Transgender Activist Gets Key Role At UK’s Crown Prosecution Service

Undated image of Sophie Cook, an independent candidate at the 2019 general election, standing on the beach in Brighton, East Sussex. Pete Jones/PA

The Director of Public Prosecutions has appointed a controversial transgender activist to a key diversity role at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Sophie Cook, a transgender woman who was a Labour Party candidate at the 2017 general election, has been appointed to a new role as the CPS’s “speak-out champion.”

But the appointment by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Max Hill QC, has been greeted with alarm by some on social media considering Cook’s track record of clashing with feminist women.

We Are Fair Cop, a group of lawyers and police officers dedicated to removing politics from policing, responded on Twitter on Thursday: “State bodies need to ask themselves what is more important—their commitment to political neutrality or their continued performative signalling to one minority group?”

In 2018 Cook appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight programme suggesting the word woman should be replaced with “womxn” to include all those who “identify as women” and said: “I do wonder why people are so offended by it ... actually the word was invented by feminists, they were quite happily using these words a few years ago ... all of a sudden, they’re taking offence.”

Cook has also used the term “terf” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) to describe women like J.K. Rowling who say transgender women are not biologically women.

In September, Cook wrote on Twitter: “Apart from menstruate [sic] and give birth (just to keep the TERFs happy (are they ever happy?)) nothing. I may not be able to do everything well, but I could potentially do anything just as long as there isn’t a required grade.”

After the appointment, Cook wrote on Twitter: “This is an amazing role which gives me the opportunity to make a real difference.”

But Sarah Phillimore, a family lawyer, wrote an op-ed in The Critic in which she said: “It is particularly disappointing seeing our country’s independent prosecuting authority adopt this kind of performative ‘inclusion.’ In reality, it is promoting the political ideology that elevates gender identity expression above the protected characteristic of sex.”

In 2017 Cook was Labour’s candidate at the general election in Shoreham and East Worthing but was not selected to contest the 2019 election and later left the party, standing as an independent and winning only 255 votes.

The new role is a four-day-a-week job with a salary of £31,000.

A CPS job advert, reported in The Times, said the speak-out champion would “be responsible for improving confidence amongst our employees in being able to speak openly about their experiences” and said the role would be “instrumental in underpinning positive progress in leadership behaviours.”