TW in Women's prisons - Zoe Williams' Take

I always wonder if people like Zoe Williams and Owen Jones just keep on doubling down and wrapping their arguments in so many layers of moral superiority because the alternative of really stopping and wondering - maybe I have this is wrong - is more unbearable to them than anything else. Perhaps they’re trying to convince themselves they’re right as much as anyone else.

Why a chicken-identifying fox should be put in the chicken coop because he’s scared of the other foxes just makes no sense. Find somewhere else for him to go!

I know. Every time gender ideologies make their case, their lack of critical thinking facilities come into sharp focus.

See Billy Bragg’s response ‘well because some women assault women, there’s no point stopping males from attacking women too.’ As if women are not individuals we should care about at all, but just a category of creature we can label as ‘To Be Assaulted’.

Women like Zoe are able to argue for other women and their daughters to be locked up with males precisely because they know that will never happen to them and there’s. It’s really easy to hold a ‘principle’ you know will never effect you.

If she does (claim she) regards them that way, it’s not obvious from the article.

If she is claiming that, surely she ought to be stating very clearly that the starting point should be that all such “women” should be in the women’s estate automatically and should only be placed in the male estate if they are exceptionally violent or are risk assessed as presenting such a risk to the other prisoners in the women’s estate as to justify it. In theory, women can be placed in the male estate, though I understand it never happens. If she thinks these men should be treated as if they were women, that ought to be what occurs.

In the sentences I quoted, she compares “trans women” with “cis men”, surely implying she regards both as male? I note she’s very cagey throughout, referring to “trans prisoners” regularly rather than acknowledging which subset present specific risks.

So I expect you are correct, because literally the only logical reason that men who claim they are women should be placed in the women’s estate would be if you believed them actually to be women (hence all the mantras, trying to embed that idea by repetition), but that she is unable to make that argument with any clarity either means that she can’t bring herself to say it because she knows nobody actually believes it, or (and this is possible from the other comments above) she is simply such a poor writer that she is unable to make one, single clear point about the argument she is trying to make.

It’s probably the latter, isn’t it? 🤣

@JanesLittleGirl Sorry, I missed your much more concise response!

No. That bit (actually most) of the Geneva code applies to prisoners of war. This was a very specific category, and the protection applied to soldiers is the reason you always see people giving their name and number immediately when they are taken prisoner in old films. (And also why East European soldiers were treated so much worse by the Nazis than West European in WW2 but that's of topic). There are now protections for civilians in wartime too, but that's separate legislation.

But also - if, like Zoe, you think that transwomen are women then you can argue that NOT housing the transwomen with women is breaking the law. And actually, there has been a push (and a push back) to get a "more modern understanding of gender" imbedded into international law. This would be disastrous in my opinion. But long story short, I don't think there is much help coming from that direction.

Good idea. I wonder if that suggestion would be signed off or deemed to risky.

As I say frequently, it is worth writing a letter for publication. Saturday’s Guardian does seem to carry a fair few GC letters. I very much doubt ZW reads this corner of MN, but a letter pointing out how statistics have been played fast and loose might make it on to the page

I read this briefly after seeing Mr Bragg's incompetent take on it. I couldn't work out what she meant but didn't it say inmates? or did I read it too quickly due to being too cross?

Completely agree.

It's very simple, this. If Zoe thinks it is acceptable to house transwomen prisoners in the female estate, then she should have no problem with spending a week in a female prison with transwomen herself.

The Guardian should commission her to do this as an investigative piece. She can share a cell with such a transwoman, chosen by blind lottery so it has that element of random chance as to who she will get: will it be a Barbie Kardashian or a Miranda Yardley who forgot to pay their TV license?

If you are going to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk.

I read this evening and was hoping there would be a thread. Some of the stuff she writes it’s like she’s actually a troll like she writes deliberately inflammatory nonsense

Ah, this article is obviously the price for Lucy Mangans fair review of “gender wars”.

Good point. Yes.

I believe in California more than two hundred male prisoners are currently applying to be transferred to female prisons.

Several incentives for even men not identifying as trans, especially if their sentences are long:

Less likely to meet violence from people stronger than they are, more likely to have access to heterosexual sex and, for those who prey on women, more prey. Also, women's prisons tend to be somewhat more comfortable places on the whole, I've been told.

It seems that California doesn't require any medical transitioning or anything beyond a self-identification, so trying for this makes sense much more widely than just for those who actually are trans-identified.

That's not the UK, of course. But the data from the US, Canada, and the UK all suggest that a much higher percentage of trans women are in prison for sexual assault than is the case for male prisoners, on average. This, to me, would suggest that the scrutiny for that possibility should be central in deciding who can be moved into women's estate.

Sadly no. The Geneva Convention only applies to prisoners of war.

I have a genuine question - are the UK government breaking international law by housing male prisoners with women prisoners? Isn't this a breach of the Geneva Convention?

And if they are, is anyone going to take them to court?

Why do people keep going on about Karen White she wonders?
Because it was an atrocity like something out of a Russian Gulag it was inhumane and not worthy of a supposedly civilised country to lock up a woman with a male rapist.
Zoemight have sold her morality for her career but it’s getting harder for them to pretend that they have the moral high ground as the facts become known.

This seems pretty obviously prejudicial: no cis man would accept his essential nature being extrapolated from that of a male sexual offender.

What?! What the hell is she talking about? Men do exactly this. This is why men - the good, normal ones - don’t go into women’s spaces, like changing rooms or toilets because they accept that the bad men - the male sex offenders - are the ones that do that. Men accept that their essential nature as men as a class, not as an individual, is defined by all the bad things bad men do. And most men have absolutely no issue with it.

Because, and this I always come back to, the fundamental issue is always, always,
‘Do you believe humans can change sex?’ - and the answer for an increasing number of people is No, obviously not. She’s still at the stage of pretending that she does believe that humans can change sex, and so she doesn’t see the ‘Transwoman’ prisoner as a man.
I had a wonderful hairdressing appointment with my trusted longstanding - gay male - hairdresser last weekend. And for the first time since I have known him (23 years) he raised the GC issue…
He started off by (almost whispering) that he’d been listening to a podcast ‘The Witch Trials Of…’ - at this point I was holding my breath!😂 ‘… JK Rowling’, and did I know of it or anything about the subject? Anyway, he said he wanted to hear both sides and that so far he was definitely feeling he was GC, very much on the side of privacy, dignity and safeguarding of women and girls in same sex safe spaces, but he still wasn’t sure whether or not Transwomen who had had surgery should be allowed into those spaces. So I simply asked him whether or not he believed humans can change sex? His answer was, No. And I said, well then, that’s the rub, there’s your answer. It’s literally all you need to know. And he was taken aback, and said omg yes you’re right. That was it. He was getting there on his own but suddenly he was no longer confused. We moved on to why, as a gay man, he might feel the trans ideology is deeply homophobic. He hadn’t seen that either and was frankly shocked by the revelation. He finished my hair and moved on to the lady next to us, and she started up the conversation with him! More peaks than the Himalayas that day…

So pithy Morris, love it! I think Lucy Mangan is GC, she’s generally quite sensible I find, so it fits.

I've followed this absolute roaster's career from her days writing 'columns' for Now magazine. She. Cannot. Write.

She cannot persuade. She rambles. She refers to her husband and kid as R and P, so the nefarious reader can't crack the code.

Her Guardian meanderings about having a baby were eye stabbingly embarrassing. No first time mother should be given the nations ear, it's cruel to them and to us.

And now she's a trans pally fanny. Of course she is. Her continued employment is an affront to anyone required to work for a living.

My sister hates her too.

its always the kind of women who cannot imagine, under any circumstances, that being banged up with with big Dave is ever going to happen to them. What with being nice middle class people, and that.

You’re absolutely right, but the problem is that you regard trans women as a subset of men, whereas Zoe treats them as a subset of women. If Zoe is right then of course there is no reason to treat them differently from other women; if you’re right there’s no reason to treat them differently from other men.