Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the HM Prison and Service Offender Equalities Annual Report 2022-23, published on 30 November 2023, how many and what proportion of transgender prisoners convicted of a sexual offence were registered as (a) male and (b) female at birth.

We have strengthened our policy so that no transgender woman convicted of either a sexual or violent offence, or who retains male genitalia, can be held in the general women’s estate, other than in truly exceptional circumstances, which must be signed off by a minister.

A total of 100 transgender prisoners had a sexual offence as a principal offence and were housed in prison establishments across England and Wales on 31 March 2023.

If a question is posed for information and the total figure amounts to five people or fewer, the MoJ must consider whether this would be likely to lead to the identification of individuals and whether disclosure of this information would be in breach of our statutory obligations under the UK General Data Protection Regulation and/or the Data Protection Act 2018. We believe that the release of some of this information would be likely to lead to identification of the individuals concerned.

For this reason, it is not possible to provide a split by legal gender (i.e., counts and percentages by legal gender male or legal gender female) or to provide a split by geography (i.e., counts and percentages in England and Wales).