Would You Like to Share a Prison Cell with This Person? **MNHQ edit, this post contains rather graphic material**

re gender critical trans - there is at least one who self-identifies as AGP, a couple of transsexuals, and myself of course (detransitioning m2t). the thing most of us share is the ability to acknowledge the huge amount of male privilege male socialisation imparts.

Just dropped back in to say - I don't know if many of you follow this issue on twitter, but there is a small but growing network of gender-critical trans women on twitter who have spoken out about this, are happy to discuss things with feminists without calling anyone TERF or telling them to DIAF, and who (bizarrely) are now being labelled "TERF" themselves by trans activists and allies (including some non-trans men, who see nothing odd or inappropriate about telling a trans women she is transphobic for not having the same opinons as him...)

Anyway, it's incredibly heartening to see this small but increasingly confident group say, yes, they are trans women, but they are also male, if not actually men, and yes, penis is male, and no, they shouldn't lay claim to women's space, or demand access to women's bodies. They've been speaking out on this issue and saying how totally out of order the SRLP has been in championing this murderer/rapist.

I've seen some people saying it's "transphobic" to talk about this, because it risks painting all trans women as potential threats.

But - the last time the whole "trans woman in male prison" issue came up, it was with Avery Edison, the comedian who went to Canada to see her girlfriend without the proper paperwork, and was (to nobody's surprise except hers) not allowed in, and the Canadian authorities held her in a male facility, although segregated from the men. There was a big internet campaign to correct this terrible injustice.

Now, Avery's crime wasn't in the least violent, and was probably down to a massive case of young, middle-class, white entitlement (how stupid and privileged do you have to be to think your paperwork doesn't matter at all when you go to another country, because, y'know, you are white and middle class, so why wouldn't they let you in anyway?), but Avery - young, white, middle-class, mostly-law-abiding, unthreatening, respectable Avery - is also the person who wrote about how their penis wasn't like a man's penis, and how transphobic you were if you treated it as such, and how hurt she was by the terrible transphobic woman she picked up in a gay bar, and who was happy to have sex with her, but not PIV. And Avery wanted PIV, and so she went to bed with her anyway, and then wrote a blog about what a terrible, terrible, no-good, hurtful transphobe this woman was for having enthusiastic sex with Avery but not allowing Avery PIV.

I wouldn't want any women to be obliged to share a prison cell with nice, young, middle-class Avery either.

personally i don't believe people are born evil, and while i don't know what this person went through as a child, i suspect there mut have been something that resulted in them committing such a horrendous crime. i would imagine that the options for someone who has committed a crime like this are very limited, could you ever truly come to terms with what you'd done? you could committ suicide, become even more of a 'monster', or kill the person who committed the crime and replace them with someone more nurturing - a metaphorical suicide, if you will.

of course none of this ill-informed apologist neurobabble changes the fact that he did rape and murder a child, and the idea that he should now be admitted to a female prison because his crimes have sent him doolally is dangerous.

i think most of my sympathy is reserved for the family of this poor child, i can't imagine having the whole thing in the news again is something they wanted, but that's exactly what's happened, and it's hapened because yet again men put the rights of other men above women.

Yes x 100 to that last paragraph.

That second link has some stats in it which seem pretty unlikely to me, CKD, and I am really uncomfortable with the direction it is pushing which seems to demonise all MTF trans people.

Surely the extreme trans activists like the organisation in the OP are giving enough rope without needing to resort to this?

The fact that a group of people born and raised male can display violence associated with men is no surprise clearly but this blanket association with trans = sex crimes

I feel like I'm coming across as some kind of apologist on this thread and I really don't want a row, it's weird as I am extremely vocal in my loathing for gender / gender roles / societal pressure to conform to fitting into one of these small boxes + unimaginably massive problems with what the more extreme transactivists want in terms of eliminating the concept of sex + massive outrage with women's (FAAB) funding and space being reduced / stamped out / picketed away etc. But that link is just trying to stir up hatred for a whole group the way I read it.

Surely the analysis is that men as a class are inured to VAW and that people born and raised men will not magically escape from that by transitioning, rather than a suggestion that MTF trans is synonymous with violent sexual offender / paedophile which is really what that link is strongly implying.

I know I am going to get shouted at now but I felt I couldn't read that and let it slide really.

Is that the blog where they state that Sinthia was wearing a skirt cleaning the flat when she was arrested?

I read an interview with Blast in which Blast says that Blast was wearing a skirt at the time and it was therefore ridiculous to suggest that Blast could have raped anyone

Is that the blog where they state that Sinthia was wearing a skirt cleaning the flat when she was arrested? That was an interesting read! So, far from repeatedly raping a young runaway PoC while slashing her body with a knife, s/he merely turned up later with a pair of marigolds and a bottle of jif. It wasn't her/him who killed the child, it was his lovely friend, who, it seems, accidentally broke her neck.

Sinthia took his/her cleaning duties a little far though when s/he went back to the body s/he had dumped from the freeway in a Pampers box and tried to set fire to it.

The erasure of Ebony Nicole Williams a 13 year old PoC by certain members of the Trans* community is disgusting.

Fucking hell. How much rope do these extreme trans activists have now? When will it be 'enough'?

SevenZarkSeven - It reminds me of all that stuff about the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 70s where people were so busy trying to be liberal they forgot that paedophilia was a bad thing - you know that stuff with PIE in the news.

This ^^

The way trans allies are reblogging that post saying that Blast never raped Ebony makes me feel physically sick. You know what it looks like to me? Erasure of the female victim. Current transactivism is like a fucking steam roller. They will smash, crush, destroy ANYTHING that they see as a challenge to getting what they want. Nobody else matters - not even a raped, murdered child. Nothing is as important as them getting what they want.

Ha, Disgruntled, it's true it's very difficult to distinguish troll from perfectly sincere!

(unless the trans people are DFAB)

Well, shit, if that wasn't any clearer. Born female, and you are stuffed whichever way you identify.

Checkingoftheprivilege is a troll blog, I believe. Still, the stuff posted on there is often indistinguishable from 'proper' blogs.

The issue being raised by some is that the rapist/murderer shouldn't be punished more than a non-trans person who had committed the same crime by being held in solitary, but

1. they don't seem to be held in solitary now, or be troubled by their current living arrangements, if the previously-mentioned accounts are to be believed,

and 2) if they were in a women's prison, they most likely would be segregated, as women in prison are not, on the whole, known for looking kindly on other prisoners who have killed children.

Tl;dr the SRLP's campaign makes no sense, even if you ignore the whole "prioritising the comfort of someone who raped and murdered a child" thing.

Sorry that last part was rather obvious and understated to people who I'm sure know a lot more about all this than me!

MoreCrack that is quite a logical point, I never thought of that before.

I would imagine it's a historical thing to do with some gay men and women who prefer to dress as the opposite gender either full or part time and sort of extended from there. But you're right, from a logical perspective.

Chaos that is interesting.

I think a lot of groups are feeling a bit hijacked and pressurised maybe, from an extreme element in the trans community. No-one likes to be called a bigot for refusing to accept and support things that will fuck things up for another "minority" group, often that they are in.