prisons

Who’s Been Bullying our Prisons?

Not The News in BriefsLeave a comment

Originally published on Medium on September 12th 2018

In a Guardian report about the conviction of male transgender prisoner and rapist Karen White for sexual offences against female prisoners, Frances Crook, CEO of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said this:

“It is a very toxic debate, but I think prisons have probably been influenced by some of the extreme conversations and have been bullied into making some decisions that have harmed women and put staff in an extremely difficult position,”

So who bullied the prisons into accepting a male rapist into a female prison based on his ‘gender identity’ rather than his sex?

It all started in the autumn of 2015 when transgender rights were on the table in the form of the Women and Equalities Committee’s Trans Inquiry. There were two high-profile incidents involving trans prisoners in UK jails. The self-inflicted death of Vicky Thompson in a male prison caused outrage, although it was not clear that the death was intentional, or that any request had been made for Vicky to be housed in the female estate. In other words, prison reform was not necessarily something that would have prevented this particular tragedy, although that was the lesson that was taken from it.

The bigger public story though was of Tara Hudson, a male transgender offender who caught the public imagination with the help of a convincing, if pornified, feminine appearance. A huge public campaign was set up and promoted via a Change.org petition, which received massive publicity on social media. Thousands of people got involved in the campaign. Some of the people backing Tara were politicians:

Caroline Lucas wrote personally to the Ministry of Justice on Tara’s behalf and Tim Farron wrote to Justice Secretary Michael Gove.

Predictably, all the LGBT and trans organisations and activists came out in force in support of Tara, and promoted the petition over all their social media sites:

Some organisations you would hope might be more neutral, or at least equally committed to the safety of women, were instead surprisingly gung-ho about putting a violent male in a women’s prison:

Even some purportedly feminist organisations backed Tara’s campaign:

The press gave a voice to the campaigners and the Ministry of Justice subsequently announced a review into the care and management of transgender offenders in December 2015. This coincided with the publication of the Transgender Equality Report, produced by the Women and Equalities Committee. This report contained a section on transgender prisoners written solely on the evidence of trans advocacy groups. The subsequent review from the Ministry of Justice was published in November the following year, and its recommendations drew heavily on a combination of evidence from trans lobby groups such as Gendered Intelligence, the Trans Report, and the well-publicised campaign for transgender prisoners following the case of Tara Hudson. The most far-reaching change in the management of transgender prisoners was that now it was no longer necessary to have a Gender Recognition Certificate in order to be moved to the prison of the opposite sex. Prisoners who were legally as well as physically male could, and should, now be considered for transfer.

At no stage in any of the decision-making process did the government ask for the views of women. On the contrary, women who did raise objections were vilified as transphobes. Many women did voice their concerns over the Tara Hudson case, but no one was listening.

Some very good blogs and articles were written by women on the subject, but these were ignored by mainstream media. Articles which minimised the risk to women and painted us as prejudiced and discriminatory found a home in the Guardian. The press and the BBC did not inform the general public of the seriousness of Tara Hudson’s crimes, nor did they mention the fact that Hudson had referred to himself as a ‘she-male’ and ‘a bloke’ with a ‘seven-inch surprise in my panties’ for the benefit of his escort clients. Hudson became a cause celebre for transgender rights and facts were not allowed to get in the way of the near-religious support for him.

Fast forward to September 2018 and Tara Hudson popped up again, this time as the trans guest on Victoria Live on BBC 2 to debate the recent case of Karen White. The other guests were a former professional acquaintance of White’s and Dr Nicola Williams from campaign group Fair Play for Women. Surprisingly, to start with, all guests were in agreement that White should never have been transferred to a women’s prison in the first place. However, factions appeared when the reasons behind these views were expressed. In the eyes of feminists White should not have been transferred to a women’s prison because he is male. It’s that simple. Women have had that protection in place for a long time and there is no sensible reason to change it now. Hudson though took exception to this, as in his view it was because White wasn’t a *real* transwoman like himself. Hudson was so agitated about this point he ended up being rather rude to Victoria Derbyshire on national TV.

Hudson’s point about ‘real transwomen’ illustrates the impossibility of distinguishing people by ‘gender’. If a ‘real transwoman’ has had no reassignment surgery apart from a boob job, and if trans people themselves cannot agree on what makes a ‘real transwoman’, then to keep women safe we must obviously continue distinguishing people by sex instead of gender: there is no other sensible or possible way to do it.

Other commentators have expressed the view that only trans-identified males who have been convicted of rape or other violent crimes against women should be prevented from moving to a women’s prison, but this argument too is flawed. There are men in prison for lesser crimes who may be sexually violent but have no conviction for any sex crime (we know this from the under-reporting of rape, and the low conviction rate). There are men in prison who have not been convicted of sex crimes, but will have sex (coerced or otherwise) with other men whilst they are incarcerated. Rape happens in male-only prisons already, it is naive to think it won’t happen in a women’s prison. Danger is one part of the problem, but privacy and dignity is another. The pressure to allow males to urinate, shower and undress alongside women and girls is coming from trans rights groups in and outside of prisons.

The answer to the question ‘Who’s been bullying our prisons?’ is this: Politicians, Social Justice Warriors, Human Rights Activists, virtue signallers, the press, the BBC, every single person who has used the derogatory term ‘Terf’ to diminish and dismiss the concerns of women. And all of them have been bullied in the first place by Trans Rights Activists. We are allowing legislation to be influenced by people who care more about the rights of rapists than about the safety of women. Groups like Gendered Intelligence, Mermaids, GIRES, Stonewall, TELI and Trans Media Watch campaign solely for the rights of trans people and do not care about the collateral damage caused to women and girls. Our elected representatives are failing us by giving in to the bullying tactics of extreme lobby groups.

Prisons are a small microcosm of society at large: what has happened here is already happening elsewhere, and will continue to escalate as long as the people who are supposed to be looking out for us continue to appease and to capitulate to bullies. If the unintended consequences of transactivist demands on prisons are exactly as women have predicted, then it’s important we should be consulted on other scenarios too: schools, changing rooms, refuges, rape crisis centres and women-only exemptions in the Equality Act for example. Women’s experience and expertise counts for something. Speak up everyone, it’s not transphobic to care about women and girls. Don’t give in to the bullies.

By Helen Saxby on .

Canonical link

Exported from Medium on July 7, 2021.

Why is a A Male Rapist In a Woman’s Prison?

Not The News in Briefs7 Comments

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Watching footage in the news this week of a male person running into a crowd to swing a punch at a sixty year old woman, you might be forgiven for assuming this was another example of male violence against women, and therefore proof that women sometimes need spaces of their own, in order to stay safe. You’d be wrong in this instance, because in fact this was apparently a trans-identified male doing the punching, so it’s not male violence at all: in fact the sixty year old woman is the one to blame because she wants to go to a feminist meeting about gender. It’s a neat trick: if you make sure women can’t go to feminist meetings about gender they will not be informed enough to criticise an ideology which transforms a fist-swinging male into the victim of a sixty year old woman who wants to go to a feminist meeting about gender.

It ties in with other issues raised recently by reports of a male rapist who got to be housed in a woman’s prison because he identified as trans. In both examples I’m interested to know how a man with a male body (sex) who has displayed the most extreme kind of toxic masculinity (gender) can get to be diagnosed as a woman. Where, in this man’s body or soul, is there even room for the tiniest chink of the female or the feminine? It’s surely already filled up with all the male and the masculine?

Many people seem to believe there is a process whereby, in settings like prisons, the men who pretend to be women are weeded out. People believe that only genuine gender- dysphoric men get to be acknowledged as women, and that therefore they must need this recognition and special treatment. Some common beliefs about male rapists in women’s prisons include:

She's a woman tweet

Josh jackman

Considering that Josh Jackman wrote an article in Pink News admonishing everyone for ‘misgendering’ this rapist, I thought he must have known something I didn’t.

So I decided to do some research on these ‘rigorous psychological tests’ that could prove that a man is indeed a woman, against all other evidence to the contrary. Some evidence about the Scottish prison system was sent to me. It states that ‘since 2011 prisoner healthcare has been the responsibility of the NHS’ and it gives a link to the NHS guidelines on gender reassignment for further information.

I duly read through the NHS Scotland Gender Reassignment Protocols. The treatment pathway for trans-identifying prisoners certainly takes considerable time (a whole year on hormones before assessment for surgery for example). But that’s ok: that is the one thing that the most serious of offenders have got in spades isn’t it…? Time…?

Diagnostically though, there is nothing rigorous or testing about it: it relies totally on the say-so of the presenting prisoner. Counselling or therapy are provided on the basis that the prisoner is telling the truth about his feelings, just as it is for non-prisoners. In fact, to do otherwise is now on the verge of being officially identified as conversion therapy.

A statement from UK organisations in January 2017 condemns the practice of conversion therapy and refers to a memorandum of understanding from 2015 which adds ‘gender identity’ to ‘sexual orientation’ as a characteristic which may no longer be challenged. They say:

Conversion Therapy is the term for therapy that assumes certain sexual orientations or gender identities are inferior to others, and seeks to change or suppress them on that basis.

What this means in practice is that a presenting gender identity must be taken as the truth. NHS Scotland are one of the signatories of this statement and there is pressure on NHS England to follow suit. Trans support groups such as Stonewall, Pink News, Mermaids, GIRES and Gendered Intelligence have promoted the notion of conversion therapy with regard to trans people, to the point where to question it is to be automatically labelled transphobic. At the same time they have insisted that only trans people can be consulted on trans issues. And trans groups certainly have been listened to. In England and Wales the prison service says this:

Policy guidelines

At the Trans Inquiry chaired by Maria Miller in 2015, written evidence from the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists said something more cautious:

The converse is the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences. These vastly outnumber the number of prisoners incarcerated for more ordinary, non-sexual, offences. It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard. I am sure that the Governor concerned would be happy to talk about this.

The Governor concerned was not asked to come in and talk about this. The groups invited in to give further evidence did not include any representatives from women’s groups either. Trans support group Action for Trans Health however were one of the trans representatives who were invited to give evidence. Action for Trans Health were coincidentally one of the main players stirring up protest against the feminist meeting on gender this week, mentioned above. They helped to instigate and organise the shutting down of the original venue through sustained online harassment, and they coordinated the search for the new secret meeting place so they could disrupt that as well. A lot of threats against ‘TERFs’ were shared on social media. They ‘loved’ this tweet on Twitter:

Action for trans health heart comment

After the event, when the stories of the violence had circulated, they posted this:

Action for trans health

The Trans Inquiry chose to listen to trans groups such as this one, actively engaged in fighting women and stirring up hatred, instead of women’s groups with genuine concerns over what changes to the Gender Recognition Act will mean to women’s rights and services. The result is that there can be no public discussion about competing rights. Public bodies continually have to refer to the same small group of unchallenged and often unqualified ‘experts’ who all reinforce one another. Once NHS England signs the new Memorandum of Understanding (which they probably will because they are actively ‘listening to trans people’) the door will effectively be closed, and sealed, against outside opinion. Health professionals including GPs, counsellors, therapists and all NHS staff will be constrained in their treatment of patients by a restrictive ideology which has no evidence base. Institutions such as the Prison Service, the courts and the government itself will look to the NHS for ‘expert’ opinion.

Certain things will become unsayable. For instance: ‘Young man at protest punches middle-aged woman’. Unsayable.

And men will have to be women when they say they are. There is no alternative. Even when, as recently reported, there are now eleven inmates in one prison alone seeking sex realignment surgery, all of them sex offenders. The Prison Governor mentioned above could have predicted that, but he’s not trans so his evidence was not called for.

In summary, these appear to be the new rules:

Demonise women as TERFs for wanting to have a say in legislation that affects them

Insist that only trans people should be consulted on gender legislation 

Persuade everyone that questioning a trans identity is always transphobic

Punch feminists who persist in questioning the trans narrative

Frighten everyone else into silence

Once all those rules are in place and are applied to all situations, including male on female assault in a public place and the housing of male sex offenders in a woman’s prison…job done.

And this is how a man with a male body (sex) who has displayed the most extreme kind of toxic masculinity (gender) can be housed in a women’s prison.