Sunday Times Front Cover. Trans Prison wings

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6712985/One-prisoner-50-identifies-opposite-sex.html

The MailOn Sunday follows up with some, extraordinary, numbers.

I suspect they mean had breast implants removed which shows how obfuscating terms like gender realignment are.

I raise your suspect to suspect you are right. It is a problem because many of the greater public and even those pushing the TRA agenda don’t realize post op can mean implants, or shaving the Adam’s apple, or heck, nowadays laser facial hair removal.

Many don’t understand the concerns over protecting our spaces as women because they aren’t aware most of these TIMs still have their penis and have no intent to remove them because “ladypenis” is so “dainty and feminine”.

Just got an email from my MP. A poster here suggested writing to your MP to let them know that you had signed the petition about women’s prisons and transgender offenders. To give him credit, he has written to the Prisons Minister (Edward Argar) and he sent me Edward Argar’s reply. I’d try to show it here but it is splattered all over with ‘your constituent, Nettie’, and ‘to respond to Nettie’s concerns’. It basically highlights the new policy and says the Prison Service and the Probation Service must show evidence they have consulted women and women’s organisations. I thought it was a good response so am very pleased.

sounded v much like the male presenter cared more about Helen Belcher's "identity" than women being raped in UK prisons.

Witness my amazement.

How can you get SRS reversed? I suspect they mean had breast implants removed which shows how obfuscating terms like gender realignment are.

Last year Metro.co.uk reported how a male prisoner had gender realignment surgery and spent years in a female prison, where he got engaged, only to ask to have the surgery reversed in time for his release

Of course he did....

Report in the Metro

metro.co.uk/2019/02/10/prisons-to-get-transgender-wings-after-complaints-from-female-inmates-8509804/

Last year Metro.co.uk reported how a male prisoner had gender realignment surgery and spent years in a female prison, where he got engaged, only to ask to have the surgery reversed in time for his release.

You couldn't make it up.

Well she got the word ‘penis’ in there at least. A bit of a wishy washy piece that didn’t really address issues very well.

Yes, I just heard it.

I may be in bad morning mood, but it sounded v much like the male presenter cared more about Helen Belcher's "identity" than women being raped in UK prisons.

Nicola Williams was on the today programme earlier this morning discussing this

I'd guess that the MoJ minutes were leaked, rather than released under an FoI request.

Though one of us could try asking to see the minutes ourselves under FoI and see what happens?

From The Times article:

"A number of high-risk trans inmates have already been moved back to men's prisons".

Wonder why they were deemed suitable to be transferred to the women's estate in the first place?

And what happened to make them unsuitable to stay in the women's estate?

Cynical old me thinks that there may have been other "could never happen" incidents. In addition to the Karen White offences.

I wonder if Gilligan has more to come on this.

completetly skewed and meaningless statistics ^

In the end, they'd have to redesignate a male prison to be a female prison and make it high category. Almost everyone in it would be trans since only a tiny number of female prisoners are in high risk categories.

If there's 4000 women prisoners and 1000 trans women - that will heavily affect statistics about women prisoners wont it!? Statistics relating to violent crime, or being victims of domestic abuse....

I dont like the idea that 1 in 5 female prisoners could be men.

4,000 women prisoners and an expected 1,000 trans women prisoners. There's simply not enough room in the female estate for this nonsense, so of course something has to change - trans wings are definitely the answer, and they can't complain.

(Again: not suggesting accommodation in the female estate - just that trans wings may well not be the simple answer many are assuming it is.)

I have a niggling worry about this, can anyone comment on human rights for prison visiting/family contact?

You go where you get sent. Prisoners are quite often moved between prisons, especially if they cause trouble.

However, as I said above: it is genuinely bad for prisoners both during and after sentence if family contact is poor or breaks down.

And there will be low risk, non violent trans prisoners who are perfectly capable of successfully rebuilding their lives post-sentence, just as there are in all prisoner groups. And that's something we all want. Less recidivism.

Then they should be housed in the male estate & given adequate protection within those prison buildings. Housing them with women is not the answer.

I have a niggling worry about this, can anyone comment on human rights for prison visiting/family contact?

I've been looking at a map of the distribution of prisons in England & Wales www.justice.gov.uk/contacts/prison-finder and the main concentration is through the SE and Midlands up to the M62 corridor, with a small cluster in the NE. Huge chunks of the SW, Wales, and the more rural parts of the NW have very little prison estate of any kind. This already means that the families of prisoners from those areas have to travel a long way.

The trans prison population is small vs the whole prison total. It doesn't make sense to have a trans wing in every prison - you would be looking at confining these prisoners to a small number of sites on the grounds of cost, efficiency, and access to specialist medical/psychiatric care. Logically, that then means some families will end up with an inordinate distance to travel - eg Cornwall to Birmingham. Does this create a loophole for a legal challenge to keep someone in the female estate on human rights grounds? What about those in the juvenile estate (given the rocketing number of kids identifying as trans, this population should go up proportionately)? What about those in forensic psychiatry units?

Maybe I'm being pernickety but we've seen how easily the system is gamed...

I saw maybe 50 comments. The ones I saw commenting on Gilligan were saying they were pleased he was pursuing the story. Of the rest many were on-topic and reasonable.

The Times said that if it was not happy with the comments (nasty remarks at author) they would pull comments. I didn’t get to see any do I don’t know for sure.

Trans prisoners expected to rise to 1000?
They literally would not fit into female prisons if the numbers rose that steeply.
Remaining in men's prisons is great news but would Labour/Lib Dems fight to overturn this if in power I wonder?

Does anybody know where the source of Gilligan's material for this article comes from? And is it available online?

On Twitter, he mentions "minutes of the Ministry of Justice transgender advisory board" and has shared screenshots of redacted material from those minutes. For example, "X stated that she expects the transgender or non-binary prison population to increase to around 1000)".

Maybe it was a FOI request that Gilligan raised?

Or maybe those minutes were leaked to Gilligan?

I don’t understand why The Times are brave enough to publish a perfectly factually true story, and have comments open, then pull the whole lot (rather than just allowing the mods not to print anything abusive.) Who is pressuring them into not printing comments?