Four female inmates at a women’s jail in West Yorkshire say a transgender prisoner sexually assaulted them.

According to The Daily Mail, the first assault happened within days of the transgender prisoner, Karen White, arriving at the jail.

One woman says the transgender prisoner was visibly aroused during the attack. Another female inmate says the transgender prisoner talked inappropriately about oral sex, and a third inmate says the transgender prisoner attacked her. The fourth inmate says the transgender inmate kissed her on the neck.

The BBC says the offenses took place between September to November 2017.

The transgender prisoner has been sent to a Category B men’s jail. She will appear at Leeds Crown Court in August.

According to The Daily Mail, there were 125 transgender prisoners in England and Wales at the end of March 2017. The year prior, there were only 70.

Transgender women can legally change their gender with a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and have lived as a woman for two years.

Judges use this law to decide which gender facility that transgender prisoners will be sent to— male or female.

Officials from the Ministry of Justice told the BBC that in the “great majority” of cases, transgender inmates are allowed to “experience the system” in the gender they identify.

Officials also said “strict safeguards” were in place to…

A federal appeals court is set to decide this year if a historic black church in Pittsburgh has a First Amendment right to fire its pastor after church expenses doubled and membership plummeted under his leadership.

Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, a historic church founded in the late 1800s and located in one of the city’s poorest communities, is defending its right to choose its own religious leaders free from government interference, according to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

The church’s former pastor, the Rev. William David Lee is suing the church for $2.6 million for breach of contract for dismissing him in 2015. The church hired Lee in 2012 and approved, at his insistence, a 20-year contract early in his tenure as senior pastor, according to court documents cited by Trib Live. Lee’s lawsuit was previously rejected by a federal trial court, citing Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, which Becket won at the Supreme Court in 2012.

Lee is appealing that decision, arguing that the First Amendment shouldn’t apply because his failure to “attract new souls to Christ” was a “secular” failure, in the same vein as a sports manager failing to “attract new fans to…

A Taylor University professor, who has worked in Christian publishing for years, has stepped down from his teaching position after being accused of inappropriate sexual conduct with students 14 years ago.

Dennis E. Hensley is accused of hugging and kissing a student in 2004 after she told the professor that she had been recently raped. The university was notified of the incident but it did not force him to resign.

The student, Rachel Custer, was 23 at the time. She said she told him she had been raped and had reported the assault to police. Custer says Hensley held her hands while she cried, hugged her, kissed her tears and then kissed her on the mouth.

Custer said she pulled away and left the room before Hensley told her that the incident would be their “little secret.”

“It’s just hard to explain how much this messed with me,” she said. “After the situation I’d been through, I thought I was in a place that was completely safe.”

Hensley, however, says he has meant for his actions to be supportive and not sexual.

“I was trying to be gracious. I was trying to be comforting. I meant nothing in the way of any harm to her,” Hensley said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. “Now this is coming out 14 years later, with this whole ‘Me Too’ kind of thing, and everyone is piling on the bandwagon.”

Because of his experience in the…

The pastor whose church is hosting the Revoice conference next weekend is addressing the confusion many have expressed about the event amid concerns unclean spirituality is being allowed into the Church.

The Revoice conference says it intends to “support, encourage, and empower” LGBT Christians and promote their “flourishing” within the historic Christian tradition and its doctrine of marriage and sexuality. It is scheduled to take place next weekend at Memorial Presbyterian, a PCA congregation in St. Louis, Missouri.

In a lively interview on the CrossPolitic podcast Sunday, Greg Johnson, who pastors Memorial Presbyterian, insisted the conference is approaching this in a way that attempts to cut through semantics and instead engage the issues of substance when it comes to Christians who may identify themselves as “gay.”

Right from the start, Johnson was asked by host Jason Farley if he would allow his church to be used for a conference aiming to speak to Christians who say they have sexual attractions to children.

“If you’re talking about people who have sexual brokenness, and they…