It has emerged

You don’t say.

Male sex offenders can skew crime statistics and put women at risk by claiming to be female when arrested, it has emerged.

Ya think?

It hasn’t “emerged”; feminists have been pointing this out for years. Remember the murder of a lesbian couple and their son in Oakland a few years ago? The suspect was reported as a woman but was in fact a trans woman. That’s just one example.

Humza Yousaf, the justice secretary, confirmed in parliament yesterday that criminal incidents are tracked according the self-identified gender of victims, witnesses and suspects. It prompted concerns that Scotland is introducing “self-identification through the back door” by allowing police and courts to record crimes according to the gender suspects feel they are.

Politicians, experts and women’s groups have warned that this could distort crime statistics and result in offenders who are male-bodied being placed in female-only refuges, exposing other inmates to danger and upset.

Not “could” but would, and in fact already is. And the male-bodied offenders are also people who grew up with male privilege and entitlement, however much they also felt not at home in those bodies.

Joan McAlpine, a fellow SNP MSP, had raised concerns that sexual offences are disproportionately perpetrated by biological men and asked whether self-identification would therefore lead to a “misleading” rise in the number of women recorded as sex-offenders. Official statistics show that 1,007 men were convicted for sexual crimes from 2017 to 2018, compared with 46 women.

Ms McAlpine, 57, said: “Aside from the statistical corruption, I cannot be the only woman who finds it deeply offensive that male sexual violence can ever be badged as a female crime.

Indeed she cannot, and she is not. Lots of us find it infuriating.

She highlighted the case of Katie Dolatowski, 18, a transgender sex offender who preyed on girls in public toilets in Fife and was housed in women-only accommodation after being convicted. Ms McAlpine said the policy meant Dolatowski was “recorded as a woman, when this person doesn’t even have a gender recognition certificate and is therefore legally male”.

And is housed in women-only accommodation despite the conviction for preying on girls in female-only toilets. It’s grotesque.

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