Self ID in Belgium; no news is good news

A wall of silence among journalists and institutions means the effects of self-ID are impossible to know

Article first published on the Glinner update newsletter on 11 January 2023

The argument goes like this: if you introduce self-ID, perverts will take advantage of the simplified process to do perverted and/or criminal things in places where women are vulnerable. This is the case being made by women all over the world as our governments come under increasing pressure to favour the sexual desires of cross-dressers over the safety of women and children. You know… diversity! 

But self-ID is the law of the land in a number of countries already. Surely we can easily find out if the doomsayers are correct? I live in Belgium, where self-ID has been in force since January 2018. It’s not a big country (population approx. 11.6 million), so the number of people who have availed of the process is relatively small. Before self-ID, about 900 people had already changed their legal sex. Since self ID became law, an average of about 500 people per year have done so (with a considerable dip and rebound pre- and post-COVID). 

The Gender-feels ministry claims that there are about 55k transgender people in the country. 

I don’t doubt it, personally: I encounter autogynephiles on a semi-regular basis in Brussels. There are two in my co-working space. The HER app is full of local transbians. I saw one scooping up his terrier’s faeces in my local park just the other day. I am a stealth member of multiple Facebook groups dedicated to Belgian AGPs. There’s plenty of it about. 

“Haar penis” 

And yet, I had never come across a single story in the press mentioning a crime committed by a transgender person, of either sex, in either of the country’s languages, sexual or otherwise. I had never seen a “woman rapes baby” or “her penis” headline like those that have become increasingly common in the UK and US. 

So over a few weeks in summer 2022, I searched through the country’s major and minor news sites for the terms “femme transgenre”, “transfemme”, “transfeminine”, “femme trans-identifiée”, “transvrouw” “vrouw transgender” and “haar penis”.

But I only found puff pieces, like this one celebrating a transsexual taking part in women’s competitive cycling and winning. There was also a lot of coverage of the tear-jerking story of a transwoman being held against his will in a male prison. This one was interesting: “Saaya '' had been behind bars since 2019. I happened to know, thanks to sleuthing by fellow Belgium-based TERFs, that the decision to place a man in a women's prison is taken on a case-by-case basis by the municipal authorities where the prison is located. They decide based on such things as: does the man pose a danger to women? In fact, men don’t even need to have undergone the administrative procedure to change their sex to be allowed to join the women. So then why was Saaya in with the men? Did he do something that made the authorities worry he would be a danger? I contacted his lawyer to try to find out. No, of course he didn’t reply. 

As it happens, at around the same time, a tabloid newspaper in the south of the country reported that Miss Transgender Peru had been arrested for trafficking transgender-identified men from Peru to Belgian cities. He had been taking their passports and forcing them to have unprotected sex with multiple men per day. It was a sensational story, and the pictures of the accused, lifted from his Instagram account, were very glam. He was sent to the women’s prison in my neighbourhood and released shortly after. The story only emerged after he had already been freed. 

So there was one, at least, and I forwarded the tip to Reduxx. But, pre-empting retorts from TRAs, I realised it had nothing to do with self-ID in Belgium itself. Also, I felt like it didn’t really count because he was clearly a transsexual and not an AGP, the typical profile of the “her penis” protagonists.

Evidence of absence 

I thought: ok apart from one gay Peruvian human trafficker, there are no trans criminals in Belgium, only stunning and brave ones. Does that mean that women’s instincts are wrong, that transvestic fetishists are not more likely to be flashers, frotteurs, voyeurs and perverts? Are British and American perverts not only more numerous, but also more devious? 

Or, could it be that transwomen’s crimes are being filed under women’s crimes?

If that’s the case, surely the country’s crime statistics would reflect a rise in crimes committed by women. In a section of the federal police’ crime stats website, a PDF reveals a wealth of data. You can find out how many crimes had more than one perpetrator, how many involved a building that belongs to public authorities, how many involved jewellery... all the way back to 2010. 

However, when it came to recording sex, details were conspicuously absent. The only parameters, first of all, are male or female. So no trans crimes, if any, are being recorded (or at least communicated). Most intriguing though, was this: while you can see the evolution of statistics for all kinds of things for a decade, the figures for the sex of the suspect are only given for the present trimester. They are then replaced the following trimester, so you don’t get a historic view of sex statistics like you can for everything else (type of crime, number of perpetrators, type of building etc…)

“We don’t communicate that”

Because the statistics for female crimes are overwritten every trimester, you can’t see any figures from the past and you can’t come to conclusions about trends. I got a patchwork of previous trimesters via the Wayback machine, but not enough to do any kind of analysis. So I contacted the police and asked them for the previous stats, but I was told “we don’t communicate the age and sex of suspects.” Well you do, I thought, but in a really bizarre and opaque way.

“Why do you do it this way?” I asked, presuming there was a logical and rational reason for this (and there may well be).

No response.

Follow up. No response. 

I thought: the police are ignoring me because I’m just a Twitter nobody, but surely seasoned Belgian crime journalists might be able to help. So I looked up crime stories and contacted their authors.

No response.

From a previous life, I knew an investigative journalist who had won prizes for exposing corruption. At first, he seemed interested in talking to me, but then I followed up with my question in detail - “do you know of any protocol on reporting crimes committed by transgender people?”

You guessed it. No response.

Perhaps the question “Have more women been incarcerated since 2018?” would yield more results. It was a long shot because not all crimes end in a prison sentence. But it turns out there are no stats for that either. I did find out about three different research projects on “queering prisons” that were piloting mixed-sex detention centres (that’s a story for another day - and it’s a doozy).

Because they didn’t realise I’m a TERF, the researchers agreed to be interviewed. It was confirmed that yes, there are transwomen criminals, being housed with the women, but this has been going on for years, there are no official records, they don’t even need to have changed legal sex, and the federal government has even funded a project that will facilitate easier transition (administrative and medical) for detainees. 

Men are already being housed in the female estate (self-ID or no) but self-ID has empowered more lads to avail of the two-signature procedure to get themselves into the cushier quarters. 

Not newsworthy

I asked both of the researchers I interviewed: why do you think the stories of their crimes were never reported in the press? Why do you think the UK has so many more of these stories? One said she thinks the media in the anglosphere likes to sensationalise stories about transwomen. But she also told me that she was aware of at least one man who had a psychotic episode and attacked a woman in prison. 

Not newsworthy, apparently. 

I managed to get an interview with the Flemish press ombudsman, and I asked him: “Why has there not been one single report about any crime, sexual or otherwise, in the Belgian press of either of the country’s languages involving a trans woman since January 2018?” and “Why won’t journalists answer me?”

His answer: “I really don’t know. It is an interesting question.” A friend contacted a columnist for one of the biggest broadsheet Flemish dailies, who said she had not personally heard of any kind of interdiction. But she writes think-pieces; she doesn’t go to crime scenes. I found the Flemish journalists’ association’s ethics guide. It simply said that a journalist must ensure that “the wording of his reporting is not stigmatising, for example when mentioning elements such as ethnic origin, nationality, religion, philosophy of life, sexual orientation or gender.” 

What’s going on? 

What should I conclude? The way I see it, there are three options. The first is that no trans-identifying man, with or without having utilised self-ID, has committed a crime since January 2018. Option two: they have, but they were recorded as having been committed by a woman. Option three, they have, but they were recorded as having been committed by men. 

I contacted social workers from inside my local women’s prison to see if I could get more information on the profiles and crimes of these detainees. “I have a lot to say about that but I can’t” was one response. “I’m burnt out, I need a break” was another. “Get back to me if you don’t find anyone else who will talk.” But I never did. I dropped the whole thing. But it all came racing back to me in late December when UN gender chief Victor Madrigal Borloz, as part of his effort to lobby the Scottish parliament into accepting self-ID, tweeted that in all the countries with self-ID, there were no “findings of abuse by predatory males”. 

It has certainly occurred to me that there might be too few people in Belgium for any trans crimes stories to be statistically significant. There may not be any at all. After all, the country is very small. But is it a coincidence that the first countries to introduce self-ID in the EU were the tiny territories of Malta, Ireland, and Belgium? If self-ID had been the law of the land in Germany for the past five years, you can count on at least one “ihr Penis” story per week. It might be relevant to note here that Scotland is also a small country. Make of that what you will. 

We don’t wait around for the police to arrive 

It pisses me off to even have to rake through crime statistics and newspaper reports to confirm what I know instinctively. It’s not the data that reveals to me I have been ogled, groped, leered at, felt up, hit on, commented upon, and masturbated at since about the age of about eight. When these things happen, women get the fuck out of there; we don’t take names and we don’t wait for the police to arrive. Heterosexual men with a crossdressing fetish should not be encouraged, not least by the United fucking Nations, to cross the boundaries we have spent our lives erecting. 

Four days after I published a thread on this topic, I kid you not, a Belgian newspaper published the story of a transwoman who had been convicted of a sexually-motivated crime. He had sent his lawyer lewd messages because he was not happy with the outcome of his trial. Reading between the lines, we find out that he was convicted of rape as a man, and appears to have changed legal sex after he committed the crime. I wanted to confirm this astonishing, relevant, and newsworthy fact, so I wrote to the journalist who reported the story. I will let you guess the response.