Sex by deception - Gayle Newland

Gayle Newland was convicted in 2017 for sexual assault using a prosthetic penis without her victim's consent. The case is referred to on page 256 of Material Girls. The BBC report states that she tricked her blindfolded friend into sex. See also Guardian report: the strange case of Gayle Newland.

It is an unbelievable case. One of the counts under Section 2, Sexual Offences Act 2003, related to oral penetration. Are we meant to believe that the victim did not realise this was done with a prosthetic penis?

Be that as it may, the reason Kathleen Stock cites the case in Material Girls is to critique Stonewall and others, who want to alter the law on sex by deception so that it no longer applies to trans people.

Stock references a blog in 2017 by InherentlyHuman, aka Professor Alex Sharpe, Keele University, where Sharpe writes: “In my view, prosecutions of this kind should not be commenced.” Sharpe goes on “to suggest that we think about ignorance, as Eve Sedgwick has argued, [Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)] as a form of knowledge, as a kind of learned unknowing, as something not so easily divorced from human agency? That is, we might think of ignorance as a form of disavowal, and in the present context, as a repudiation of the senses?”

To suggest that ignorance is knowledge sounds like nonsense to me.

Surely, as long as we believe that consent is required in sexual relationships, we need laws to prevent sex by deception? If so, they need to apply to trans people in the same way as anyone else.