Last November, a tweet from J.K. Rowling caught my eye. It was her comment on the decision of an Australian court to mandate that the ‘preferred pronouns’ of people identifying as transgender be used as a “matter of respect” to ensure “public confidence in the proper administration of justice.”
As Rowling noted: “Asking a woman to refer to her male rapist or violent assaulter as ‘she’ in court is a form of state-sanctioned abuse. Female victims of male violence are further traumatised by being forced to speak a lie.” Indeed, forcing a woman to refer to the man who abused and raped her as ‘she’ seems a particularly grotesque form of gaslighting.
As I noted at the time, the phenomenon of sexual assault victims being forced to refer to their abusers as female is an almost unique form of cruelty—and yet, press story after press story reveals that this cruelty is still occurring. A heartbreaking story in The Sun titled “My male rapist claimed to be a woman so cops, lawyers & judge all called him she – it’s unfair, only men can commit rape” by Julie Bindel is particularly harrowing.
The ugly tale unfolds on the Channel Island of Guernsey.
Bindel recounts the story: “It was early summer in 2021 when 17-year-old Freddie Trenchard invited Anna, 14, into his home. He reassured her his mum and her boyfriend were there. At the time, Anna [not her real name] had known Trenchard for two years. Once she was in his room, where she thought they would watch TV, he started touching her thighs and waist. ‘I repeatedly told him to stop,’ says Anna, crying and shaking as she recounts the horrific events.’”
Anna told Bindel that like so many other young men, Trenchard was inspired to sexual violence by pornography. “But he forced me to have sex,” Anna said. “He wanted dominance over me. He was choking me, and doing things men see in porn…I’m bleeding…it was so painful…I was sat on his bed, I was crying, I was holding the sheet over me, I was hysterical.” Her rapist told her to “leave before she made more fuss.” When his mother asked her, as she limped past, if she was alright, he interjected: “She’s fine.”
She was shoved out the garden gate, which he closed behind her. Anna went home, threw away her clothes, and told a friend about the assault several days later. Seven months after that, she told her sister—but not her mother. Her mother found out when she found out that Trenchard was “chatting up one of her best childhood friends” and Anna posted “He’s dangerous, stay away from him” on social media. A screenshot was sent to her mother and in February 2022, she reported him to the police.
At this point, an already horrifying story got worse. From Bindel:
Trenchard is now 20 and goes by the name Alyssa Christine Trenchard — although he has neither changed his name legally nor had surgery. When he raped Anna, his only physical step towards transitioning had been to wear women’s clothes. Yet at the time of his arrest, Guernsey Police recorded him as a woman. This set the tone for lawyers and other legal professionals to describe the attack as having been committed by a “transgender female” with “her penis”. And by specifying in court that Trenchard was “biologically male” at the time of the rape, the prosecutor implied that by the time of the trial this was no longer true.
Trenchard appears to be a porn addict—not surprising for someone of his age. Pornography probably has much to do with his decision to identify as transgender, as well—as Bindel reported, “even though Trenchard has revealed [on TikTok] that he becomes sexually aroused when referred to as ‘Miss’, Judge Catherine Fooks agreed at the outset that all court officials should call him ‘Miss Trenchard.’”
When Trenchard was referred to as a “transgender male,” the judge actually “reconvened the court after proceedings has finished” in order to apologize to him and assure him that the court record would be changed and he would be referred to as a “transgender female”; Anna, understandably, refused to refer to her assailant as “he” at any point. Trenchard’s lawyer, however, “claimed sexual intercourse had not taken place and the victim as motivated by transphobia.”
“[This is] the dirtiest trick, to actually refer to somebody as bigoted,” Anna told Bindel, emphasizing that she doesn’t really care if someone identifies as transgender and has friends that identify that way. “I don’t have a problem with that at all. But only men can commit rape. Why pretend otherwise? All he had done was start dressing as a woman. The worst thing was that in court he was trying to use the fact he identified as a woman to say he should be treated like a woman, [and that] he knew the struggles of being a woman. How dare he?”
Anna continued: “When he says, ‘I’m a woman’ but then rapes someone, it’s unfair against the trans people who are genuine, and against women…His penis raped me, it was attached to him. He controlled it.” As a result of her assault, Anna became depressed, anxious, and even self-harmed. The fact that the rape had been her first sexual experience haunted her, as well. “That’s not what my first time should have been like.”
Trenchard, Bindel reported, was convicted of rape on July 28, 2023, and has been sentenced to three years’ youth detention. He will be quartered with the males at night. Despite the sentence—the jury’s guilty verdict was unanimous and reached in less than an hour—“Trenchard was then released for three months pending sentencing,” and the judge “gave him the maximum sentencing reduction possible,” and at sentencing probation services insisted that Trenchard was “unlikely to commit any other offence”—presumably, Bindel notes, “because he now claims to be a woman.”
Stories like this are a key reason that public opinion is turning against the transgender movement. Trans activists claim that their movement is about tolerance. The reality, however, is that the rights—and safety—of women and girls are being sacrificed to pander to the mental illnesses of men. Stories like this, we were told, would never happen—and that even bringing these things up is to reveal transphobic paranoia. They are wrong.