The news in the Telegraph that convicted paedophile Karen White, a transgender person (previously known as David Thompson and born as Stephen Wood) who now stands accused of rape, was remanded into a women's prison and, within days of arriving there, sexually assaulted four female inmates has understandably aroused considerable interest and been fairly widely reported (from the Mirror to the Mail).
I've seen comments elsewhere that the BBC hasn't reported this, but - of course - it has. There's a brief report on it in the Leeds & West Yorkshire section of the BBC News website.
The BBC report, as is the BBC's way, persists in using the female pronoun to describe the offender ("She has since been moved to a male prison"), though - perhaps sensing that this isn't the sort of story where that kind of thing looks good - the most recent revision of the article removes two other uses of it.
In other words, it looks, from Newssniffer, as if the heavy use of the female pronoun in the first version of this brief piece (three uses in just five short paragraphs) was later deliberately toned down. ("...before she was jailed" becomes "outside prison" and "She previously admitted two further rape charges" becomes "White previously admitted two further rapes").
The BBC is certainly 'woke' in its use of language.
Good to see the use of 'transgender person' there. I have to stop and think about the terms and whether you can you say transwoman and transman or trans for short - tranny is not allowed, I know. The law would probably find you guilty of a phobia or a hate crime or some sort of transgression if you used it.
ReplyDeleteDo those terms mean a man who wants to be a woman and a woman who wants to be a man, or the reverse? I tend to think a transwoman is a woman who wants to be a man but that does not reflect the more common use. Officialdom and activists want to and do say that a man who wants to be a woman is a transwoman but how does that work when he has all the usual maleness and / or he rapes or assaults women? Calling him a transman would be more accurate in conveying what he actually is.
And in criminal law the male equipment is required for a crime to be classed as rape rather than assault. So what is called a transwoman, which is really a man with male equipment who wants, allegedly, to be a woman, can be a rapist but can't be called a man. Perhaps he'd be better called an opportunist predatory criminal. Nobody could charge you with phobia or hate crime for that. Well I think not but you never know.