When “Gender Deception” Is a Crime

Gayle recalls this moment differently. She says, for example, that the girl was not blindfolded. She says that Kye—an online persona she had maintained for over a decade as what she describes as a “coping mechanism”—had been brought to life as a “role play” that she and the girl jointly authored in order to be together while keeping one foot in the closet. In the days before that Sunday, they had argued, because Gayle wanted to come out to her parents. As they finished having sex, the girl suddenly started screaming. “She just switched,” Gayle says.

The girl runs into the bathroom. Per a recording, she calls 999, the British emergency number, but then tells them it isn’t an emergency. She pushes Gayle down the stairs. They go out into the street and have a heated argument—the video, though not the audio, is captured on CCTV. Gayle gets in her car and drives to a nearby bridge, where she jumps into a canal. The police find her wet and shivering, having hurt her ankle in the short fall.

“You are sick,” the girl texts Gayle.

“I love you,” Gayle texts the girl.

In the days after the fight, the girl gets an e-mail from Kye’s address. “You’ll never understand what it is like to be physically unable to be yourself,” Kye writes. “And to live as someone that isn’t who you were meant to be. With you I never intended it to go this far. It turned from a seed to a tree and I was stuck. Every day I felt guilty, but I couldn’t leave you, as you needed me.” A few hours later, the girl goes to the police to report that her best friend has repeatedly raped her.

The discrepancies between the two friends’ stories are striking. Setting aside the existence or nonexistence of the blindfold, there is, for example, the story of how they met. Gayle recalls that she met the girl at a “gay night” at a bar (the theme was Gender Blender), and that the girl was the first person she ever came out to, after which they bonded over both being in the closet. The girl—British law prohibits the release of the name of a complainant in sexual-assault cases—acknowledges that she frequently went to such events with a gay male friend. But she says that she and Gayle met at a library, and that, though they never discussed their sexuality, she assumed that Gayle was straight, “normal,” like her. “She’s dangerous,” the girl later told the police. “She’s mental. She could do this to someone else.”

In “The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial,” a new book about the 2015 trial and 2017 retrial of Gayle Newland, the British writer and editor Izabella Scott goes to some lengths to avoid calling either Gayle or her ex-best friend “mental.” Scott is wary of the antagonistic structure of a sex-crime trial, which may or may not get at the truth but certainly makes everyone look bad along the way. She worries about the narratives put forward by the respective lawyers: that Gayle is a scheming lesbian who for years manipulated her naïve friend, or that the girl, whom Scott refers to as Miss X, is a false victim, raking her friend through the legal coals in order to prove to herself and to the world that she is one-hundred-per-cent straight. In both narratives, Scott remarks, “there is a conniving woman.”

In contrast, Scott tries “to be on both their sides.” Like Gayle, Scott is a lesbian, and she is sensitive to the disgust-driven criminalization of queer desire. Like Miss X, she is a former complainant in a well-publicized sex crime (an attempted rape while she was on vacation in India), and she writes movingly about how an initial violation can be compounded by a lack of power over one’s story. Scott’s efforts to “create a scenario where neither are lying and where both stories can be true” make “The Bed Trick” a strange kind of legal drama. The usual pleasures of reading about the courtroom—the vicarious thrill of being both detective and jury—give way to the slower burn of cultural analysis. Scott treats the tale of Gayle and Miss X as a rich and layered text, in which the inconsistencies are not lies to be triumphantly exposed but symbols to be recursively interpreted.