Searching Questions Tax Police
Or :"Don’t touch me till I’ve seen your birth certificate"
14th August, 1996
Transsexual women and men have had a quarter of a century in which to adjust to the idea that they should be searched by police officers of the opposite gender. One of the least palatable outcomes of the Corbett vs Corbett judgement in 1970 was that transsexual women have to be searched by men, and vice versa for transsexual men. The official attitude is always "Sorry luv, that’s the law".
Different sensibilities … and standards … appear to prevail when the police issue boot is on the other foot though ….
This October the courts will be considering a discrimination case with a difference. They’ll be looking at the employment rights of a transsexual woman prevented from becoming a police officer because it’s believed the rights of the general public would be infringed when she searched them!
Which half of the public? Well … we’re not quite sure!
Don’t tell, they said …
The woman concerned … we’ll call her ’M’ … applied some time ago to join her local constabulary. She was quite open and straightforward about her status and the officer who took her application said it would be OK. The police are equal opportunity employers, after all…
It wasn’t long after that initial acceptance, however, that M was asked to provide a copy of her school reports … and then her problems began.
Once again she was honest. She said that she’d been registered as a boy at birth and was treated in adulthood for transsexuality. Following gender reassignment surgery she was cosmetically the same sex as her brain had always been.
Yet her police force baulked at the legal implications which would follow if she completed her training and went out on the beat. After all, the law which says that she should be searched by a male officer, because of her legal status as a man, also means that she would create a headache whoever she searched.
If they let her search other women, they could complain if M’s legal status became known … and yet male suspects would object to being searched by someone who is obviously a woman too.
Faced with such a paradox the police decided they couldn’t employ her.
A crucial case
It appears therefore that the conflicting legal and social status of transsexual people after treatment renders them unemployable in any circumstances where gender has a day-to-day occupational relevance.
Yet the case raises other crucial questions too.
The government has long insisted that the birth certificate is not a document of legal status. That is the reason why the cases of Mark Rees and Caroline Cossey failed in the European Court of Human Rights, when a similar case by a Parisian transsexual succeeded in changing French law. The birth certificate does not define your legal sex in Britain so (they argued) no rights were infringed by refusing to alter or replace it. The birth certificate is not like a French identity card. Yet, if this is so, what is the basis by which to judge M’s employability? Is it her socially unquestionned status as a woman, or the historical irrelevance of what she was labelled at birth?
Is there an unacceptable double-standard at work too? If a transsexual woman has to accept being intimately seached by a man, why is it unacceptable for a man to be intimately searched by a transsexual woman, if that’s what the law insists? Why should she be prevented from employment just to avoid a problem which isn’t of her making?
And if the law were to decide that M and the transsexual women like her is a woman, then why should other women have any more reluctance about being searched by a heterosexual transsexual woman than a lesbian one? Or are we about to learn that sexuality is a disqualifying factor too?
It’s an interesting case therefore … and one which legal experts consider highly significant in the maturing debate about just what status a transsexual person has in society. In the absence of legislation, it is also an instance in which the outcome of the preceeding Human Rights Court cases can actually have a bearing in English law.
But justice costs money
Unfortunately M is not eligible for legal aid in this case … neither is she rolling in money. We face the fact that a crucial and testing case may not even reach court unless we find just £1,000 to help finance it.
The case is presently scheduled for October 7th … the week when the Conservative Party Conference convenes in Bournemouth. Whether the case goes ahead then, however, depends largely on what you can help us raise between now and then.
Please help us if you can. For we’re only here to help you.
