Male-born sex offenders who identify as women will not be formally recorded as female, Scottish police chiefs have said.
In what's been branded a "major U-turn", Police Scotland's Deputy Chief Constable Alan Speirs wrote to Holyrood's justice committee on Wednesday to provide his "absolute" assurance that male sexual predators would always be identified as men on police records.
But the force suggested this had been its policy all along - flying in the face of prior public statements that suspects who say they identify as female would be able to "self-identify" as such.
In March this year, Police Scotland themselves said sex or gender identification of anyone who comes "into contact" with police would be based on "how they present or how they self-declare".
The trans sex offenders controversy in Scotland largely centres around Isla Bryson
PA
Though DCC Speirs flagged that this wouldn't be the case if suspects' sex was "pertinent to any investigation with which they are linked as a victim, witness or accused", the force has been slated for its previous defences of self-identification.
Gender-critical policy analysis group Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (MBM) pointed to examples of Police Scotland "persistently and vigorously" backing the use of self-ID - even for sex offenders.
Lucy Hunter-Blackburn, an ex-senior civil servant who now works for MBM, labelled the move a "major U-turn by Police Scotland".
She said: "We welcome that Police Scotland has at last recognised that allowing sex offenders to self-identify their sex is indefensible.
"It is, however, an extraordinary act of institutional gaslighting to pretend that this is not a significant policy change from their position over almost five years."
MORE TRANS MADNESS:
Bryson, a transgender double rapist, was controversially placed in a women's prison last year
PA
The trans sex offenders controversy in Scotland largely centres around Isla Bryson, the transgender double rapist controversially placed in a women's prison last year.
Bryson - born Adam Graham - had been charged in 2019 with sex offences against two women before transitioning in 2020.
Though Bryson had not legally changed sex, Scottish Prison Service guidance at the time stated that transgender criminals should be sent to prisons which matched their self-identified gender that they were living in prior to conviction.
The jail policy, based on the same principles of self-ID as Nicola Sturgeon's failed gender recognition reforms, was rewritten following the Bryson row.
DCC Speirs's letter had called gender recognition "a sensitive area of public policy"
PA
DCC Speirs's letter had called gender recognition "a sensitive area of public policy" and, in light of a lack of legal charity, it had been left to public bodies to "determine policy and practice in a way that achieves a legal and appropriate balance of rights and duties".
He wrote: "The committee should be absolutely assured that a man who commits rape or serious sexual assaults will be recorded as a male.
"There is no instance or record on police systems of a male having been arrested and charged with rape whose gender has been recorded as female. This has not happened.
"The core purpose of policing is to improve safety and well-being and therefore all our policies, processes and practice emanate from this fundamental purpose.
"The gender self-identification of an individual does not supersede these wider policing principles."
