Prof Jo Phoenix on R4 Antisocial 3/2/23

I'm listening now and they are confirming that the "assesment" for men in women's prisons does not mention the danger to the women at all. It's all about hormones and laser removal, health of the prisoner...

I feel sick.

The Scottish correspondent on the programme: The case conference process in prisons to assess transwomen prisoners. It's only about the safety and dignity of the transwoman prisoner. It doesn't deal with risks about women, and in fact women aren't mentioned at all. It's clearly marked as having come from the Scottish Trans Alliance.

Jo Phoenix - There is a pattern of criminality that applies to men ie crimes of sex and violence which is not changed by gender identity (paraphrase). This is being put to Steph who is rambling...

I started off being ‘kind’ and just thinking there were no issues with trans identities, and honestly I thought all the fuss about bathrooms was a little silly with more serious things in the world.

However listening to this, I can just feel myself get more and more angry. The emotional blackmail arguments that because trans women might be vulnerable, that follow that women have to be human shields at their own risk? Grrr…

But also, this is so fundamental. That trans women might not even be recorded as such, because of GRC that we have no way of measuring or recording facts.

I now believe that NO ONE can identify as something that they are not. They can ‘try it on’, they can experiment. No problems with that. But we are becoming an unstable society if we don’t even know, if we reject facts. It has nothing to do with not allowing difference, allowing and respecting men who want to dress as women etc, but everything to do with understanding patterns of what is happening in our societies, who is the most vulnerable, why, what helps. If there is a pattern for example in prisons in trans women, we will have no idea because we have no data to discuss, analysis, understand. For women, if we can no longer know who is biologically a woman, we cannot even know if they are being discriminated against, whether risks are increasing.

Prof Phoenix is being informative and incredibly measured. Including talking about statistics that suit her case and then pointing out the problems with their reliability.

This should be challenged. Who wrote the guidelines that say the BBC must not tell the truth? That make people think these are women’s crimes? What assessment was made of the impact of false reporting on women?

DH is now commenting. Steph's "I don't know anything about that" started him off.

The BBC people seem to be thrilled with the terrible risks involved in transwomen being in the male estate and incredibly high percent of being sexually offended against.

But they did state that 50% of transwomen prisoners are there for sexual offending. With the figure for Scotland being 1 in 3.

I wish Jo had mentioned the proportion of male vs female prisoners.

Was that a statistic that half of the trans prisoners discover they're trans when in custody?

They did say that 90% of trans (people/prisoners?) have not had THE SURGERY.

Prof Phoenix responded to "but there are hardly any transwomen in prisons" with the issue of there can be a massively disproportionate impact.

Steph: we think all of the bad transwomen prisoners shouldn't be in the women's prison estate, it should only be the good ones.

Prof Phoenix provides evidence about problems. Adam Fleming asks Steph to comment. Steph's comment is "I know nothing about this".

"no incidents"
"no woman harmed"
"a moral panic"
All for clickbait?

What about Karen White?

Thanks for the shout out. Jo Phoenix has just made it very clear that this is something that has been going on for several years.

Here's the programme link. It will work while the programme is live, then as usual there is a gap of a couple of hours until it is up on Sounds.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hp4k

It is getting to throwing things at the radio time…..

’Alleged trans’ is interesting.

Prof Phoenix: this is the death of "it will never happen".

Steph stresses "alleged trans". The SPS have handled this remarkably well. There's a lot of controversy but it's fine because not one single woman in the women's estate has had an incident. The media are driving a moral panic.

"Alleged trans"

How very terfy.

Finally, some sense, the Scottish correspondent said that the Prison's Service is effectively using a form of self-ID and this is the basis of the problem. Thus indicating that "BUT THE GRR BILL CHANGES NOTHING" are obfuscating.

Adam Fleming skated over Sturgeon's use of "racist" to describe those who don't want rapists in women's prison very quickly. You could easily have missed it.

Don't know. But Scott has "transitioned". With no indication of what that word might mean in general or might mean in the case of Scott.

"Last weekend another case [Tiffany Scott] emerged" like this was a completely unknown thing.