EQUAL TREATMENT FOR PENIS AND VAGINA POSSESSORS

There is a well known adage "Work expands to fill the time available to complete the task" commonly known as  Parkinson`s Law; a proverb coined by its originator   C. Northcote Parkinson.  As a magistrate its application  first became noticeable to me when the first edition of Sentencing Guidelines was published on  13 June 2011. It dealt only with assault and had been in gestation for years.  The Sentencing Council has published four definitive guidelines in the last two years.  In less than a decade from a standing start that Council has revolutionised the government`s thinking on sentencing and imposed more or less a tick box method for all judges and magistrates to follow.  Woe betide any who do not provide acceptable reasons if they deviate from said guidelines. The latest publication is  a new edition of the Equal Treatment Bench Book published today. Ostensibly like its predecessors this is supposed to ensure that nobody is affected by any prejudice consciously or unconsciously held by sentencers. Aside from the assumptions scientifically or unscientifically supposedly held  by the writers this "book"  published by the Judicial College takes 427 pages (click link to pdf) to explain itself and "guide" its readers in their decision making.  It would appear to this old lag that someone somewhere in the bowels of Petty France is working on an AI system to remove any input at all from a fully functioning intellectually gifted human being as are most sentencers.  

The matter of gender has, in recent months, become the topic of war between so called interested parties. All manner of groups have taken to the barricades in support of their professed opinion except that their opinion   has developed into open intellectual and political warfare involving universities, publicly used changing facilities, schools and many other aspects of our society.  Indeed last week my wife who regularly attends a large city centre gym was shocked to see a short haired skinny  flat chested person with absolutely no breasts or mastectomy scars  wearing only men`s shorts walking through the ladies changing room. There being nobody else in the area she was loath to challenge this individual and was too broad minded in her social attitudes to mention this event to the manager.  I was shocked. But when a judge spares a person from jail because being unable to confirm his/her gender an immediate custodial sentence is unwise owing to his possibility of harm if he were sent to a male prison and not having the gender reassignment certificate to send her to a female prison we have gone down Alice`s rabbit hole. Whilst there is no doubt a tiny number of people who in this age as historically have a sexual structure which is ambiguous the degree of political weight attached by some for their own dubious purposes is a nonsense. As is perhaps typical of those of my generation I hold to the opinion that a person with a penis is male and those with vaginas are female.