Every year, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service releases its Offender Equalities report. I’ve covered the stats before, and the trends don’t change. The report contains the kind of numbers that cut straight through the noise around gender, identity, safeguarding, and risk.
One of the things the report tracks is the number of prisoners who identify as transgender, broken down by their legal sex. In the 2023–24 report, that group totalled 295 people in England and Wales. Most, 83%, were legally male, and most of those identified as transgender women. A smaller group were legally female and identified as transgender men.
Before going any further, it’s important to be clear about what this data represents. This isn’t a portrait of society or of transgender people as a whole. It’s a snapshot of the criminal population, which has its own demographic patterns and distortions. Most people, in any group, never come near a prison cell. What the report does show, though, is how different groups are represented within that criminal population. And that’s where the picture becomes more revealing.
Once you look at the offence breakdown, the pattern sharpens quickly.
A Parliamentary Written Answer (UIN 20298) confirmed that 151 out of 245 transgender women, all legally male, were serving sentences for sexual offences. That’s 62%. Among transgender men (legally female), the figure was five or fewer.
Compare that with the rest of the sentenced population:
- 21% of men
- 3–4% of women
And here’s the key point:
In absolute numbers, men commit far more sexual offences than transgender women, because there are far more men in prison. The issue here isn’t volume, it’s proportion. And proportionally, transgender women who are legally male sit dramatically higher than any other group.
Proportionality matters because it shows whether something is happening more often than it should. If a very small group keeps appearing in a high‑risk category, that’s not just numbers, it’s a pattern that needs explaining.
And this pattern isn’t new.
The Ministry of Justice’s 2019 figures show almost the same proportions:
- 58.9% of trans women
- 3.3% of all women
- 16.8% of all men
Five years apart, two different datasets, same hierarchy.
The numbers shift, but the shape stays the same.
Some argue the figures are skewed because the transgender prison population is small. But if this were just statistical noise, the proportion of sexual‑offence convictions should drop as the trans prison population grows. It hasn’t. The rate is almost unchanged from 2019 to 2024, even as the transgender prison population rose to 295, and then to 339 in the 2024–25 report. When the proportions stay the same year after year, the question isn’t whether the pattern exists. It’s why.
The research we do have points in one direction: male‑typical offending patterns track sex, not identity.
The long‑term Swedish cohort study by Dhejne et al. (2011) found that male‑to‑female individuals retained male‑pattern rates of violent and sexual offending. Sahota (2020) argues that transgender sexual offenders tend to show the same criminogenic traits seen in male sexual offenders: paraphilias, impulsivity, antisocial traits. UK academics such as Freedman, Stock and Sullivan note that the English prison data mirrors this: transgender women who are legally male resemble male offenders, not female ones.
None of this research claims that being transgender causes sexual offending.
It simply shows that sex‑based criminology continues to predict risk, even when gender identity changes.
Now set that against the official policy line.
HMPPS maintains, in policy documents and Parliamentary answers, that transgender women with sexual or violent convictions are not housed in the women’s estate. Yet the 2023–24 report records 51 transgender prisoners in women’s prisons. When one group has a sexual‑offence rate of 3–4%, and another sits at 62%, even a handful of placements raises obvious safeguarding concerns.
The policy says the risk is excluded.
The data shows where the risk actually sits.
And the placement numbers show the risk isn’t fully excluded at all.
The latest 2024–25 report puts the transgender prison population at 339, and rising. Probably because of transgender identities being more widely accepted.
This isn’t about identity.
It isn’t about ideology.
It’s about the demographics of the criminal population, and the hard numbers of who is convicted of what before they ever reach a cell.
The numbers don’t tell us why this pattern exists.
But they do tell us it’s real. And that pretending otherwise won’t make it go away.
Sources Used
- HMPPS Offender Equalities Annual Report 2023/24
- HMPPS Offender Equalities Annual Report 2024/25
- Parliamentary Written Question UIN 20298 — Transgender prisoners by offence category
- Sahota, K. (2020). Transgender prisoners and male‑pattern offending
- Dhejne et al. (2011). Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery
- Murray, Hunter Blackburn & MacLennan. Evidence on sex‑based offending patterns
Good piece. You may know that the same statistics occur in Canada.
The behavior of sex mimicry in nature (biological term) tends do two things. It allows males to avoid male aggression by confusing them, and it bypasses protections of female enclaves by confusing gatekeepers.
This allows males who ordinarily could not compete sexually to sneak sex encounters and fertilize eggs or copulate with females.
I believe that the “sneaky sex” creates its own pattern in humans - exhibitionistic sex (exhibitionism in female environments), territorial stalking (forcing women to urinate or dedicate in presence of the male), and more violent boundary transgressions. That’s why the compulsion to mimicry could lead to unwanted sex more often than in ordinary males.
I don’t see any research in this phenomenon any time soon. But in sociobiology and ethology the pattern is clear.