TW in Women's prisons - Zoe Williams' Take

You'll be stunned to hear Nancy Kelley loves this article:

"Because anyone standing up for them is drowned in bad faith transphobic horror for ever, aided and abetted by the majority of our national media. Still, this by @ zoesqwilliams is🤌 1/2

After three years on the other side of the looking glass, reading this piece made me hoot out loud in a kind of horrified joy. It has become shocking when someone in our media breaks ranks and says what should be mundane and obvious. Wow."

https://twitter.com/nancymmk/status/1664343225614606370?s=46&t=WHoOZ3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

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

Re: Karen White

”he is often used to represent trans women generally, and indicate that they will always be a threat to cis women. This seems pretty obviously prejudicial: no cis man would accept his essential nature being extrapolated from that of a male sexual offender.”

Every single male in prison, other than the ones who claim they are women, has no choice but to accept his behaviour is extrapolated from that of a male sexual offender, or at least is subject to a risk assessment that says he should not be placed in women’s spaces as he presents an unacceptable risk.

If this is Zoe’s argument, then she probably was pissed when writing as she seems to have missed the fact that no other male prisoners are allowed in women’s prisons and she’s arguing for the usual special treatment for men she is randomly assuming present a negligible risk without any evidence whatsoever.

I'm sure she thinks she would be lovely and sympathetic and supportive and therapeutic and that the male stranger with a serious sex crime conviction would be gratefully lovely in return. Beauty and the Beast fantasies galore.

Except that script goes:

are you prepared to be lovely and sympathetic and therapeutic at your best, when well prepared and going intentionally for your story?

how about at six am when you've just woken up in a cell? Still on duty selflessly providing nurture and care for the male sex offender in the other bed? 24/7 on duty suit you? Indefinitely?

how lovely and sympathetic will you be when the male sex offender's flashing you? In theory and in practice.

how lovely and sympathetically are you prepared to be assaulted and raped in nurturing care of this male sex offender?

Particularly when you don't have the shield of your press badge or visitor's pass, your sex offender isn't on their best behaviour because of what you're offering in terms of an interview, and you have no fast way out of the situation if you discover that you've been really stupidly naive and that your sentimental patronising lady bountiful bit isn't going to mean beans to a personality disordered serious sex offender who doesn't have empathy or compassion when perpetrating, and you're in possession of the biology said offender feels entitled to.

Because women should know better than to decide some women are OK to offer up as human shields. In this case, women in prison who obviously cannot run for the exit.

Why do I always feel more let down by women spouting this kind of crap than when I hear men say it?

I knew as soon as I saw her name how hideous this would be.

Williams is a moron.

question to no one in particular-given that the Guardian has been a complete basket case for years now, why bother reading it?

I'd like to ask Zoe Williams directly- would she be ok with herself or her daughter being locked in a room with a male stranger, with no way of getting out? Her answer of course would be no. So why is it ok for other women?

Quite.

That would make sense Red Shoe.

puffyisgood I was going to say that I used to watch ZW doing review of the papers on Sky News, this was quite a while ago. I used to think she was funny. Then one day I realised that she was as pissed as a newt. Strangely enough I don't think they had her back.
Isn't she mates with Bilious Bragg ?

She’s such a handmaiden. Maybe she would like to try sharing a cell with a TW prisoner for research purposes/a bit of lived experience (only a 50% chance they’re in for sex offences!), they could let her out once a day for some history lessons on Elizabeth Fry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Fry

I got as far as 'cis' and gave up.
I didn't want to throw my phone across the room.

Even though trans identified men are no longer supposed to be housed in the female prison estate, Zoe says there are six still there.

Prior to the public getting wind of this wheeze, trans identified males were routinely housed in female prisons. Karen White was just one of many.

And isn't kind how Zoe refers to 'her' crimes? Morally superior indeed.

Why make poor men sad by not providing them with access to non consenting female bodies on demand? The price is only a few rapes ffs, it's not like it matters. or that it's happening to anyone I care about

Out of her little tree.

Transwomen offenders don't belong in womens prisons. Firstly because such a high proportion of TW offenders are convicted sex offenders. Secondly, because a thumping majority of women in prison have been victims of male violence, and their right to live in a safe and decent environment has to trump the feelings of one or two male prisoners, no matter how strong those feelings may be.

Transwomen prisoners are kept safe in the male estate. The vast majority of them live on Vulnerable Prisoner wings, or in designated sex offender prisons. This concentration of TW prisoners can cause its own set of problems, but they don't affect or concern women prisoners.

Transmen are suitably kept in the female estate, and I can't ever see that changing. Noone would want to sign off the board that put a transman into the male estate and they turn up brutally raped. You may well ask why the same reasoning that won't put transmen into the male estate can't be applied to prevent transwomen even being considered for the female estate...

Also, the old trick of reducing everything down to threats and threat jewels. How about the right to privacy and dignity, or don't female prisoners deserve either?

I bet she'd worked her way through more than one of Waitrose's 'recommended wines for June 2023' before gushing that particular kidney stone of wisdom.

I couldn't bear to read too closely but a fair bit of it seemed to me to boil down to the classic, "there are lots of other injustices in the world/in prisons specifically, so why on earth not allow this one too?". the old ones are indeed the best ones.

Saying something is 'upside down' when most people think it's now the right way up is merely indicative of the speaker's anomalous perspective.

Good job we don't have a swear jar in this house as my first thought was: FOTTFSOFAFOSM

Well she wins the prize for managing to completely confuse as to whether she is taking about actual real biological men or actual real biological women in that with some references to trans male and trans female

and finding trans male prisoners in Holloway who had gone completely unrecorded by the system.

I assumed she meant here that men had been found in the women's estate unrecorded which is totally not on. Until later

where trans female prisoners have become synecdoche for the elemental threat biological women will always face from biological men

And I realised she was using trans male to talk about women in a women's prison. Of course they went unnoticed in the 1980s they weren't a thing.On

And I don't give a shit about the statistics, or the crimes or their chances of causing harm to women. Men should fuck off out of the female prison estate. I don't give a shiny shit how they identify.

Women, even bad ones, deserve to serve their sentence without men in there with them.

It also occurred to me that some of the assaults could have been perpetrated by male staff or visitors.

It is worth following up and reading the links within the article that show where the writer has taken her facts from.

For instance the statement that only a few (I think 6 or 7) of the recorded sexual assaults (I think that the article says there were 97 in total) in women’s prisons were perpetrated by trans women.

When you follow that link it leads to a freedom of information request and answer about these assaults.

The government is able to state how many assaults were by trans women, which for their purposes is those in the process of transitioning from a man to a woman, but who don’t actually have a gender recognition certificate.

They were unable to answer the question how many assaults in women’s prisons were committed by people born male because those who have a GRC are deemed female and the assault would not be recorded as being by a male or a transwoman but simply by a woman. (I paraphrase)