(LifeSiteNews) — UK police have clarified that body searches should be carried out by an officer of the same biological sex as the detainee, following a Supreme Court decision which defined “sex” as biological sex and not “gender identity.”
On Thursday, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) released draft guidance on searches of “transgender” individuals and searches carried out by “transgender” police officers, stipulating that “thorough police searches, such as those which expose intimate body parts, should be carried out by police officers and staff of the same biological sex as the detained person,” NPCC reported.
The guidance will allow for “very limited exceptions” in which a gender-confused detainee requests to be searched by someone who aligns with their “gender identity.”
Any search carried out by an officer of a different biological sex than the detainee must be signed off with the written consent of the detainee, the police officer carrying out the search, and the authorizing officer.
The guidance, which has now been distributed to every police force in the UK, follows the unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that legally transgender “women” are not women, since a woman is legally defined by “biological sex.”
The ruling marks the end of a battle of many years between the Scottish government and women’s rights campaigners who sought to oppose the government’s promotion of transgender ideology.
In 2018, the Scottish government issued a decision to allow the definition of “woman” to include men who assume their gender to be female, opening the door to allowing so-called “transgender” individuals to identify as women.
This guidance was challenged by women’s rights campaigners, arguing that a woman should be defined in line with biological sex, and in 2022 the Scottish government was forced to change its definition after the court found that such a move was outside the government’s “legislative competence.”
Given this, the government issued new guidance which sought to cover both aspects: saying that biological women are women, but also that men with a “gender recognition certificate” (GRC) are also considered women. A GRC is given to people who identify as the opposite sex and who have had medical or surgical interventions in an attempt to “reassign” their gender.
Women Scotland Ltd appealed this new guidance. At first it was rejected by inner courts, but upon their taking the matter to the Supreme Court in March last year, the nation’s highest judicial body took up the case.
Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, chair of the NPCC, said of the new police guidance, “Our aim has been to implement the Supreme Court judgment in a pragmatic and consistent way across policing.”
