To refer to a convicted rapist as ‘she’ insults all women

You state that Freddie Trenchard, known as Alyssa, ‘was biologically male’ when he committed the rape. This wording fully implies that he is no longer biologically male when this is demonstrably untrue. Trenchard is still biologically male and always will be, irrespective of any name change, self-identifying as the opposite sex, receiving opposite sex hormones, or as in a very small number of cases, surgery. Humans can not change sex.

WRN Guernsey is very concerned about how society, in general, is becoming unmoored from reality over this issue and believes that the consequences of agreeing to the fiction that men can become women are harmful to women and children. These consequences are playing out in the erosion of women’s rights to single-sex spaces and sports, and the medicalisation of young people who have been taught in school that whether one is a boy or girl is merely a feeling in their heads and a matter of personal choice.

It’s bewildering that in both legal proceedings and news media reporting, where truth and facts should be paramount, you and the court chose to use female pronouns for Trenchard. To refer to a convicted rapist as ‘she’, when there is no legal requirement to do so insults all women, especially the one in four of us who have been sexually assaulted or raped – a crime that can only be committed by a man.

WRN Guernsey supports people presenting any way they wish and that those who adopt trans identities are entitled to the human rights enjoyed by us all, but this support cannot extend to subverting empirical facts, particularly in a court of law and news media.

Jane Roper

Co-ordinator, Guernsey Women’s Rights Network

www.womensrights.network

@WRNGuernsey