Bizarre: Gender Bending leads to Prison

This is almost too bizarre for words. A person has been sentenced to eight years in prison for the horrific crime of not being in possession of a natural penis.

It all started with an online relationship, in which a woman took on a male persona to woo another female. Finally they met, and apparently that meeting lead to some bedroom activity where both a blindfold and a strap-on penis were involved. When the lady on the bottom peeked around her blindfold and discovered the fake guy on top of her, the law somehow got involved. The "fake guy" was convicted of sexual assault and sent to prison.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/fake-man-who-tricked-woman-into-sex-jaile d-for-8-years/2015/11/12/6ba2dfbe-896a-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html

In a world where a man can (more or less) be accepted as a female by simply dressing as such and declaring it's so, why doesn't it work the other way?

If using a prosthetic organ during a sex act is "sexual assault", then where does that leave men with implants? ...or women for that matter.

The sentence seems ridiculously long. I can't understand it. Maybe the judge had some personal axe to grind?

It's call "rape by deceit". It means the person didn't give consent for that person and or that act. It's illegal in most places - but in California it's not illegal unless the woman is married (yes, an ancient law there says that if an unmarried woman consents to have sex with someone then it doesn't matter that she was tricked).

And when you have sex with someone with consent the local laws will either call it rape or sexual assault.

For example:
If a woman is half asleep when a strange man crawls into bed with her, and she thinks that he is her boyfriend coming home early, then she didn't give the stranger consent to have sex with her.

If a woman is at a Halloween party and someone notices that he's wearing the same costume as her husband, sneaks her away, and they have a dirty moment in a closet, then she didn't consent to have sex with a stranger.

If woman consents to have sex with a man as long as he wears a condom and she later learns he poked holes in the condom, then she didn't consent to having unprotected sex.

At one time it covered "I'll marry you if you do me now - just joking!" (seduction by promise of marriage) but I think most places have dropped those laws because they no longer believe that women must be protected from false promises.


In this case a woman consented to have sex with a man. She did not consent to have sex with a woman. Someone had sex with her without consent and that someone is going away for 8 years.
That sounds about right.

I guess it's a case of "she said, she said"... In all seriousness, "sex by deceit" or however you want to define it, is still non-consensual. Since a strap-on was used and the victim was expecting a real penis, rape, or at least penetration by a foreign object might also be appropriate. The sentence of eight years sounds harsh but the article doesn't give many details and there's likely a lot of stuff that didn't make it into the formal charge(s). The perp may have had prior offenses, the "probation report" (that's what we call it here) may have revealed a lot of background issues, the victim may have been greatly traumatized (mentally if not physically), etc. Plus, this is a British court, and the laws regarding a lot of things are very different than in the US. I guess the lesson here is to be honest with someone when you want to have sex with them and if they say "no", find someone else. There's many, many fish in the sea...


Are you sure? I live in California (lifelong born and raised) and, increasingly, it seems that pretty much everything is illegal in California, unless it involves marijuana. The politicians here have a mania for regulating everything in the apparent belief that they're improving our lives, instead of just telling us what to do. Of course, a few years ago, I was surprised and chagrined to discover that, at the time at least, neither cannibalism nor necrophilia was specifically illegal here. Go figure...

Call it trickery, false impersonation, fraud or even embezzlement, but rape? And eight years?

I just had a thought: Does this bizarre incident remind anyone of "M. Butterfly"?

Yes, I'm sure. There was an outcry a few years ago when people tried to fix the archaic attitude of that law and couldn't - because any criminal change that could see more people going to jail has to get pass a budget committee that wouldn't agree to it and

oops! They were able to fix with the second attempt. Yes, it took two attempts to change "impersonate her husband" to "impersonate her husband or boyfriend". The details are at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_deception#United_States

I find it hard to believe the 'victim' in this had no idea that the 'perp' was a woman. But even if she was tricked into consensual sex with another woman, the 8 year sentence seems incredibly harsh. It seems to me we have two young women badly in need of psychological counselling. The judge who sentenced her apparently sentenced a child rapist to only 6 years. Maybe he should get some counselling as well.

The laws in California are increasingly complicated, as is their implementation. California has long been under a Federal court order to reduce overcrowding in its prisons and, recently, Governor Brown finally ordered the release of thousands of inmates to accomplish that. In addition, we passed a ballot proposition to reduce many felonies (and felony convictions) to misdemeanors and to allow many prison inmates (by definition felons) to be re-classified as misdemeanants and re-sentenced to be allowed to serve their sentences in jails, even multi-year sentences, which the jails are not set up to accommodate as the previous law limited jail sentences to a period of one year or less. Needless to say, the jail inmates convicted of less serious non-violent or property crimes were mostly summarily released and now the courts are highly resistant to jailing anyone, much less sending them to prison. If this crime had happened in California today, the perpetrator would likely have gotten probation and be forced to register as a sex offender. Also mandatory counseling and maybe some "community service".

Despite the chaos you describe in the Californian penal system, it sounds to me that in this particular case California would have got it about right. Eight years in prison is completely excessive.