Telegraph - Women prisoners who call transgender inmates ‘he’ or ‘him’ face extra jail time

@PurgatoryOfPotholes I disagree. It is a Judge who comes into the prison to sit as an independent adjudicator. The same must be proved as in if this were prosecuted on the outside and prisoners can have representation. It's the same offence.

@TalkingtoLangClegintheDark I'm not saying the fact someone can be prosecuted for misgendering is right or wrong. What I'm saying is that the same standard applies inside and outside prison and my frustration is I feel the reporter is trying to churn up rage by misreporting the context which worries me as I fear can damage the real message many on these pages want to get out.

Let's not be misdirected by it, the focus should be on appropriate placement of transgender prisoners to protect women in prisons.

Sorry- a huge paragraph of my post got deleted by me before I pressed post.

What I'm.trying to say, is I don't think this is a "it'll never happen". I would have thought the Marion Millar court case would never happen, and it's happening!

But it doesn't even need to go as far as a judge. It's been brought up in the context of an additional judicial sentence- but is that necessary? What about early release dates being adjusted? What about people with vendettas?

What about if the judge is scheduled to visit anyway, and something like this happens because there was an opportunity to be seized?

I think this is unhelpful reporting rather than any change.

Why does it need to be a change to be newsworthy? Why not just something that is being revealed that was already the case but that the general public weren’t really aware of before?

I don’t get this attitude at all.

I find remembering pronouns a huge cognitive load. I have a colleague who is he/they and I feel petrified whenever his (their??) Name comes up because i just can't work out what I'm supposed to say. Do I say "yes he is a good manager, I really like they"? The whole thing is madness.

We're talking about the possibility that women who are already in prison might have their release date changed for being insufficiently polite to a transgender male prisoner in the estate.

People have their release dates changes all the time. Good behaviour means an early release but what does good behaviour mean? And this will be decided internally.

isn't this bullying of women using the protected characteristic of belief, though? Couldn't a woman defend herself using that?

This article feels misleading. What would need to be proven is essentially a public order offence, whether in prison or out of it, so I can't see a Judge convicting let alone doleing out jail time for a simple misnaming of pronouns. On a completely separate note for another day I thought s.5 wasn't imprisonable so am surprised more days can be added where it appears in an adjudication, I'll definitely be looking into that more!

Unfuckingbelievable.

So many excellent posts on this thread!!

Does anyone else ever get that, where you could literally quote or highlight the vast majority of posts, because you agree so wholeheartedly with them?

Why the general public isn't more shocked by the fact we're have a framework of authoritarianism put in place and the scale is not creeping it's being constructed rapidly and with gross restrictions.

It’s really alarming to see how readily many people will accept this, isn’t it Embarrassing.

Thank you for your excellent posts, Eresh, Datun and Potholes.

The idea that women who won’t play along with the lie that a male person is the same sex as them are guilty of bullying or harassment is a complete reversal of what’s really going on here. Another outrageous DARVO.

Putting male prisoners in a women’s prison is bullying, harassment and abuse of the women.

Making women prisoners refer to a male prisoner using female pronouns is bullying, harassment and abuse.

Punishing women for not following the rules of a misogynistic, authoritarian ideology that undermines and removes their own human rights is in itself a particularly vicious form of state mandated abuse of these women’s human rights, just as in wider society the same pressure being exerted on women to conform to these ideological demands and accept the huge social and legal changes they bring with them is a form of structural abuse of us, a violation of our human rights.

This whole thing since the inception of the GRA in 2004 has been a campaign of sustained harassment against women.

100%, OvaHere.

It’s just rot to say it’s “transphobic bullying” if a woman refuses to use incorrect sex pronouns for a male, for whatever reason. Just buying into the lie that some male people “are” women and should therefore, morally, be treated as women.

We have to challenge this at the foundation, challenge that very idea, and that is why this is such an important issue and one that absolutely needs to be highlighted and revealed in all its cruel misogyny.

We need to turn the picture the right way up again so we can see that this is not the bullying of vulnerable, disenfranchised male people by powerful, privileged female people, but the other way around. Powerful, privileged male people bullying vulnerable, disenfranchised female people. As per bloody usual.

It’s no coincidence that one of the most crucial, foundational goals of “trans rights” activism is to get mass public acceptance of the lie at the heart of all this. Everything hinges on it, everything. No wonder they have to monitor and enforce adherence to the linguistic smoke and mirrors. They have nothing without it.

Not sure if a Bible is used any more...

Jurors and witnesses are required to affirm and can choose to do so on one of several holy texts, or just promise. Legally it makes no difference.

It's a clumsy workaround but I find it's always worth checking to see if something has already been archived at any of the usual places or:

web.archive.org/

Links ending in . is trigger an automated instruction to hide the post

We can't post archive links now
Don't want to derail this thread, but do we know why not? Can't see anything about it in either the main or naughty corner talk guidelines.

*But what we have is re-writing of rules and regulations, organising committees, having meetings, getting advice and mangling laws, to try and make the lie work as the truth.

Handwringing, over and over about what to do with transwomen, how to designate them, what panel they need to go in front of, what qualifications they need, what credibility their history can and can't provide.

And it sometimes still feels like the original smack to the solar plexus, when we realise we're still doing this because everyone has to pretend it's not a whopping lie.*

100%

Interesting point that a witness in court has to swear to tell the truth. Not sure if a Bible is used any more but it used to be. If, for example, a Christian has sworn on the Bible to tell the truth then can they then be forced to lie by calling a man a woman? Surely that would be religious discrimination?

And you see this slipping into any reference to someone as being male as being "misgendering".

Exactly. As it was always going to. Some people really need to do a course on coercive control.

You're not allowed to discriminate against someone on the basis of their religious views.

But no one thinks that that means you can't say Jesus wept, or oh my God in front of a Christian. They don't use those terms because to them it's blasphemous. But no one is telling female prisoners that if they say Jesus F Christ in front of a Christian, they could get more days added to their sentence.

Thailand's lese-majeste law, which forbids the insult of the monarchy, is among the strictest in the world.

It has been increasingly enforced ever since the Thai military took power in 2014 in a coup, and many people have been punished with harsh jail sentences.

(continues)

Anyone can file a lèse-majesté complaint, and the police formally investigate all of them.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-29628191

I don't think the King of Thailand has ever personally overheard any of the comments. Much like blasphemy laws, in which it's never God H**self who brings the charge, it always seems to be someone else who made the objection. Almost like people will use rules to control others, given the opportunity.

Chelsea Mitchell wrote an op-ed for USA Today, which they edited after publication to replace all references to "male" with "transgender" so they had her complaining about having to compete with "transgender athletes" rather than "male athletes".

This societal-level enforced immersive fiction is making communication implausibly difficult.

I don't believe it is a human right to be referred to by the pronoun of your choice, so I don't perceive any correct use of pronouns as "harassment" or "bullying". I recognise the law does and I think the law is misguided.

And you see this slipping into any reference to someone as being male as being "misgendering". Any leeway on pronouns is extended to all indicators of male/female because they are understood to be denoting sex, and hence if you force the lie on pronouns, you can force the lie globally.

Like when the Connecticut athlete Chelsea Mitchell wrote an op-ed for USA Today, which they edited after publication to replace all references to "male" with "transgender" so they had her complaining about having to compete with "transgender athletes" rather than "male athletes". And they apologised for the "hurtful language".