Police are being told to ask suspects and crime victims whether they are male, female or intersex.
The move has been branded woke, ludicrous and a clumsy attempt to pander to transgender activists, who argue biological sex is on a spectrum and there are more than two sexes.
The new guidance, titled Protected Characteristics: Operational Recording Data Standard, has been devised by members of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC).
Its aim is ‘to provide policing with consistent values by which to record protected characteristics’.
Such characteristics include age, sex, race, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy, sexual orientation, religion and being married or in a civil partnership. Under the Equality Act 2010 it is illegal to discriminate against a person based on any of these features.
However, Dr Nicola Williams, a biologist and director of feminist group Fair Play For Women, opposes the guidance. She said: ‘Intersex is not a third sex and it should not be categorised as that. Intersex is a medical condition and a disorder of sexual development.
‘You either have male disorders of sexual development or female disorders, so people are still male or female even if they fall under this intersex umbrella. Anything that smashes the idea that sex is not binary adds to this idea that sex is on a spectrum, which has been promoted by trans activists.’
Dr Kate Coleman, of Keep Prisons Single Sex, which campaigns for women to be held in female-only prisons, said: ‘It is inaccurate, deeply offensive and ludicrous to state, as this question does, that people who’ve been diagnosed with differences in sex development are neither male nor female.’
Harry Miller, founder of Fair Cop, which challenges police infringement of free speech, added: ‘This is another rejection of the biological reality by the police.
‘It’s simply pandering to transgender ideology. It’s got nothing to do with policing and it doesn’t make anybody safer.’ The outcry over the guidance comes amid concern about the increasing tendency of police forces to record the gender that a suspect identifies with, rather than their biological sex.
An investigation by Keep Prisons Single Sex last year found that 13 police forces said that where a suspect has a self-declared gender identity, they will record this rather than their birth sex.
Feminist campaigners have repeatedly warned that failing to accurately record a person’s biological sex will skew the crime figures and make it appear that offences are being committed by women when the offender is in fact male. There are no centralised Home Office rules on the recording of ‘protected characteristics’ by police forces.
But the recommendations made in the NPCC guidance were agreed in May by the Chief Constables’ Council, which represents police forces nationwide.
It is now up to individual forces to implement the changes. The majority will be expected to follow the approval of the police chiefs.
In the guidance, alongside the advice for officers to ask suspects if they are male, female or intersex, it is stated the definition of sex is the same as the Government’s.
This explanation of sex, the document explains, refers to ‘the biological aspects of an individual as determined by their anatomy, which is produced by their chromosomes, hormones and their interactions, generally male or female and something that is assigned at birth’.
However, Fair Play For Women and Keep Prisons Single Sex pointed out that the definition of biological sex in the Equality Act – the legal blueprint for protected characteristics – only stipulates two sexes: male and female.
Last night the NPCC declined to respond to the criticisms of its guidance.
Click to read the Keep Prisons Single Sex report on new police guidelines for recording protected characteristics: https://kpssinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Protected_Characteristics_Operational_Recording_Data_Standard_for_Policing_2023.pdf
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Sanchez Manning
