Sonia and the Gender Cops

How British columnists turn police violence into another chance for anti-trans rhetoric.

Previously: Concerned looks at the Copa Copaganda | Another toxic "rotten apple" is revealed but the British media will never truly demand that the orchard is uprooted.

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This is a guest post from Sasha Baker, who pitched me this idea. They have been paid for their contribution.

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When a serving Metropolitan Police officer — who was only later dismissed — pled guilty to more than 80 sex crimes, including 48 incidents of rape against nine women, most people were shocked but not surprised. But for Observer columnist and leader writer, Sonia Sodha, it was another opportunity to pin male violence by an ‘elite’  firearms officer on trans rights. She tweeted:

One of the familiar lessons of the awful David Carrick case is that sex offenders often seek the statuses, positions and professions that open door to abusing women & children more easily. Why those who argue “rapists don’t need to pretend to be something they’re not to rape” are wrong.

She is leveraging Carrick’s horrific crimes to argue trans women need to be excluded from women’s prisons, hospital wards, domestic violence refuges and other women-only spaces — all of which can be accessed without a gender-recognition certificate — and to justify the Conservative government’s overreach in using the Section 35 ‘nuclear option’ to block the Scottish government from using its devolved powers to expand trans rights.

It is telling that Sodha’s column this week was about the Gender Recognition Act, which she believes to be a threat to women, rather than the clear and present danger of violent cops. Her Observer columns on police violence have shied away from overt transphobia, but in an article written in the immediate aftermath of Sarah Everard’s murder, she dog whistled towards it:

Domestic abuse is a gendered crime and female survivors need refuges run by women – those who understand its victims’ trauma because they have lived it themselves. This is not to deny there are male victims who need their own services, but these cannot displace specialised support for women.

Women’s refuges are a vital resource for survivors of domestic abuse, but Sodha’s language is slippery. She could be arguing against funding cuts to women’s services, or specifically advocating for trans women, who she considers ‘males’, to be excluded. Everard’s murderer was a police officer who used his warrant card to get her into his car; it was not a case of domestic abuse.

Sodha paints a picture of the problems in the justice system but her solution side-steps policing and courts:

We cannot solely rely on the criminal justice system: it takes too long, too many men get off and those that don’t are eventually released, often to repeat the pattern. The Drive project assigns male perpetrators a caseworker who supports them to reduce abusive behaviour and holds them accountable. Evidence shows that it works to keep women safer.

This scathing indictment of the criminal justice system should lead to advocacy for real change, but her final paragraph is addressed to men as a whole:

We need you to amplify our calls for generously funded trauma therapy for victims of male violence and for work to hold violent men accountable, both within and outside the criminal justice system. And we need you to talk to your sons. Because in failing the boys of today, we are failing the women of tomorrow.

Sodha isn’t the only columnist to sidestep these questions. Catherine Bennett, another Observer columnist, wrote a column on this theme in the wake of Wayne Couzens’ sentencing for the murder of Sarah Everard. It begins by calling out the misogyny that pervades the courts system:

Everard was, Lord Justice Fulford said, “a wholly blameless victim”. Ah. The other sort – the woman who contributes to her own death at the hands of a pitiless stranger – evidently lives on in the mind of the senior judiciary.

But Benett’s focus quickly shifts from the  police towards the supposed threat presented by trans women:

David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, was among the prominent men tweeting their abhorrence: “Enough is enough. We need to treat violence against women and girls as seriously as terrorism.”

Sometimes, you gather, it’s acceptable to discuss endemic male violence against women and girls and sometimes it’s not. Just before the Everard verdict, Lammy had angrily dismissed women exercised by this very subject as “dinosaurs”. Women who value women-only spaces – where they feel safe from male violence – he characterised as “hoarding rights”.

Bennett’s diagnosis of misogyny in the justice system is rendered toothless by the lack of prescriptions for how to alleviate it. Her call for the law to continue to discriminate against trans people so that she can feel safe is stomach-churning. She writes:

…single-sex spaces – from refuges to hospital wards and rest rooms – historically protected women by excluding men where women were particularly vulnerable. #Notallmen, of course, but that’s safeguarding.“Preventative measures,” as Professor Kathleen Stock writes in Material Girls, “are usually by necessity broad-brush. They aren’t supposed to be a character reference for a group as a whole.”

Toilets and hospital rooms have never been entirely single-sex spaces, attended to by doctors, nurses and cleaners of all genders, while the erosion of refuge care is due to cuts to services, not trans people, who struggle to access domestic violence services despite experiencing extremely high rates of abuse.

What’s more, the measures required to effectively police a cis-women-only pace speak to a cop mentality among those who demand strict single-sex policies. Making it socially normal — never mind legally enforceable — to challenge someone’s sex in a women’s toilet will create pressure on people to show ID, or reveal their genitalia, both of which form part of police procedure and have been used to harass, stalk and assault women.

Cis women and trans people of all genders face the same threats from the police. Both populations experience high rates of sexual violence and domestic violence, which have abysmal conviction rates; both experience sexual harassment and assault when they come into contact with police, either to report a crime or when accused of one; and both have genuine reasons to fear the police as they patrol the streets.

Sadly, transmisogyny is baked into our public conversation about gendered violence and policing. Karen Ingala Smith, who compiles the Femicide census — a yearly record of women killed, mostly by current or former male partners — is often quoted in articles about police failures to intervene in domestic violence. She refuses to include trans women in the census.

The Centre for Women’s Justice, which brought a super-complaint against the police nationwide over its failure to tackle domestic abuse, is run by Harriet Wistrich, who despite her important work, wants to see trans women excluded from single-sex spaces, and has argued that transgender defendants should be misgendered in court in some circumstances.

Wistrich wrote in The Guardian about her proposed solutions to police violence against women, with the systemic permissiveness towards Carrick’s abuses in mind.

In particular, there needs to be an independent reporting and investigation system so that victims of police perpetrators can come forward with greater confidence, and there needs to be effective protection for whistleblowers within the police, who too often experience victimisation when they report colleagues. Colleagues and particularly managers who joined in with or turned a blind eye to misogynistic “banter”, or assist with acts of victimisation, should also be held accountable and there must be zero tolerance of sexism and misogyny within policing.

This relies on the assumption, seemingly shared across the commentariat, that the police could, learn to effectively investigate itself; if only the worst offenders were removed, a culture change would follow. Yet we know that there are 800 working Met Police officers who have been accused of some form of sexual abuse or domestic violence, and that the organisation closes ranks when criticised.

Nonetheless, Wistrich writes:

Some have argued that these cases show we should defund the police, but such a proposal could only ever lead to an escalation of crimes against women. What we require is radical reform, and meaningful accountability for those responsible for making these changes.

There is nothing radical about these proposals. They call for the police to hold itself accountable, which it has proven itself incapable of doing, promising openness and self-reflection while demanding more manpower and surveillance capabilities and closing ranks. The police do not prevent violence against women and girls, and, in fact, perpetuate it. The government’s solution is always to hand them new powers, while the most prominent public advocates offer little in the way of solutions.

It takes someone without such an investment in upholding the status quo to propose real change. Maya Bhardwaj wrote in gal-dem after the violent policing of the vigil for Sarah Everard:

The solution to this violence is clear: abolition, a political movement that advocates for the complete defunding and dismantling of police and the prison systems and follows in the legacy of the movement to abolish transatlantic slavery, is the only option. History has shown that the police will not police themselves.

For Bhardwaj, this means:

…moving funds from prisons and policing to community infrastructure. It means investing in community organising and building community centres, activist and political education spaces, and spaces for people to deeply know each other. It means education on consent for young people, particularly young boys. And it means practising mediation and harm transformation processes, not only in response to abuse but before conflict occurs.

Even without advocating full abolition, middle-class feminists could acknowledge that the police will never be the right organisation to respond to violence against women. But, as they continue to insist reform is possible, scapegoating trans women is an easy way to wrap up columns that demonstrate that the justice system perpetuates misogyny, then shrink from the implications of that reality.

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