Blog Post by Prof Alex Sharpe

[SusanBunch]

Alex is a professor of law at Keele and a trans woman. This is Alex's response to the concerns raised by feminists:

inherentlyhuman.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/foxes-in-the-henhouse-putting-the-trans-women-prison-debate-in-perspective/

I don't want to go through it point by point because I have had a long day and I am already feeling a headache coming on. However, some general observations:

-Seems to suggest that the figures cited of numbers of trans prisoners are false. Did they not come from a freedom of information request from the BBC? Why the hell would they be inaccurate? Is Sharpe suggesting the prison service gave inaccurate information? Suggests that lots of them might be trans men, which skews the stats. The 27 trans people convicted of rape are definitely trans women, because rape requires a penis. Also, given the very small total number of women in prison compared to men in prison, I would venture that the number of trans men in prison would be absolutely minute (as in fewer than 10 or so). I also highly doubt any of them are in there for sex offences.

-Sly little dig about how it's ironic that GC feminists call themselves feminists at all. What, because we don't want to adopt a philosophy that would place the needs and rights of the rapist above the victim? So dismissive of women's concerns.

-Uses the argument that this is such a small problem as to be almost irrelevant.The thing with prison is that you only need one high-risk person in there to create a risk to numerous other people. Karen White assaulted four women in New Hall in a very short space of time. Had he been in there longer, the number would no doubt be much higher. If the 27 convicted rapists were all placed in different prisons, the number of women at direct risk would be substantial. Let me be clear: ONE incident of this is one too many. There should be no guidance whatsoever that allows this to happen.

• Suggests that this was simply due to a lack of proper risk assessment and there is nothing wrong with the basic policy of placing trans women in female jails. No- the point is that we do not have mixed sex prisons due to the risk this would place female prisoners at (plus a whole host of other reasons). Trans women like Karen White are fully intact males. Yes, they claim to feel female, but they have male genitalia, male bodies etc. It is not feasible to do a risk assessment in every case. In any event, a male prisoner who has not been convicted of a sex offence can still be high risk to female prisoners. We simply cannot have a system where we say it is okay to let males onto the female estate if they feel female. It's illogical and utterly nonsensical. If we did, we should abolish sex-segregation in prisons full stop.

• Suggests that this is not a problem because guards abusing women is a worse problem. Ridiculous argument imo. Yes, it is disgusting how many women are exploited in prison. So you want to add to that by introducing even more danger? That makes sense...

• The 'women do it too' argument, citing a case of a teacher who had a lesbian relationship with a pupil. While it is always wrong to have a sexual relationship with someone in your trust, the case Sharpe has cited is absolutely nowhere near the same as the horrific violence that Karen White perpetrated against his victims. Emily Fox is highly unlikely to be a risk to any woman in prison just because she is a lesbian who had a relationship with a girl aged 15. It's actually disgusting to place them in the same category- it has really made me angry and upset reading that.

From that article, I can see that Alex utterly dismisses the concerns of feminists, questions our status as feminists (because we can apparently only be feminists if we centre the interests of natal males), and engages in misogynistic comparisons that utterly downplay the seriousness of what happened in New Hall Prison. I hope to God this ends soon. I keep wondering whether I am living in a parallel universe and I can't understand why some female academics are applauding this. Maybe fear. I don't know.

It makes me appreciate the brave and amazing feminist scholars who do dare to stand up to Alex Sharpe and co even more.

From the AHRC FAQs :

‘The topic of the research is decided in advance and is research to support the work of a cultural, arts or heritage organisation. Each student has at least two supervisors, one in the HEI and the other in the partner organisation. The student will need to spend some time researching at the partner organisation as part of their research.’

Cultural, Arts or Heritage organisation !!!!

What the actual fucking hell ?

Wonders if there are any funded studentships in documenting: Women Prisoners: Their Right to Autonomy and Safeguarding in Penal Institutions.

Probably not... Any academic wanting to supervise something like that would probably be hounded out of their post by Natacha Kennedy and co. Any research their student did would be widely discredited. I would warn someone against putting themselves in the line of fire at such an early stage of their career.

I don't think I would ever write about this sort of stuff. I doubt it would get through peer review on the UK feminist journals. Even so, it would lead to a barrage of abuse from members of the academy, including most likely from people who I thought were my friends. Sophie Allen is a GC academic at Keele. She is not in the same School as Alex Sharpe, but I can imagine that life is not easy for her there. She is very brave as she is of a junior rank to Sharpe.

Here is another offering from Sharpe, in the form of a self-confessed 'take-down' of Rebecca Reilly-Cooper. Contains the line:

“we are all ethically bound to recognise another person’s declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender.” And, of course, recognition, if it is to mean anything, requires inclusion.

Sums it all up... We are ethically bound to include anyone who says they are a woman. It's meaningless if we just accept and respect them. We actually have to let them into our spaces, otherwise it won't really mean anything.
Yours sincerely, someone who lived with male privilege for over 40 years and seems to have retained it despite transitioning.

inherentlyhuman.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/the-poverty-of-gender-critical-feminism/#more-1865

Gender to be fair, the AHRC does fund a wide range of legal topics. It's not all about heritage. It's the main research council that funds PhD topics in law-related topics, along with the ESRC.

Thanks Susan, it just seemed extremely odd to me, as someone unfamiliar with Academia.

I’ve wondered if Sophie and Alex are acquainted, Alex seemes the type to make waves. I know Keele well, it’s not hard to imagine they will cross paths.

"we are all ethically bound to recognise another person’s declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender.”

Who says? Don't think so. So your argument falls down there mate, as I reject its central premise.

Ereshki do you even need to ask who says that? Judith Butler obvs.... With Alex’s little added extra about how it can only be meaningful if we have the penises actually in our spaces.

Fair enough! Not a fan of Butler. Alex is a rape apologist.

Gender yes it’s not a big place is it? I am sure they have crossed paths. Rosa Freedman posted some screenshots of Natacha Kennedy’s smear campaign in which a member of Natacha’s group said they were mates with someone at her university and that they would use their contacts to try to discredit Rosa. Really, really scary. It would not surprise me in the slightest if similar contacts have been used at Keele to try to take Sophie down (which will be easier as she is a lecturer, not a Prof).

The thing is, you can be as clever as you like and have 90 million degrees coming out of your arse- you still won’t be able to convincingly argue this one. It doesn’t stack up, no matter who makes the argument.

Agree 100%. Also I was kidding re the Butler thing- it’s just that any time TRAs quote something academic, you can bet your life it’s Judith Butler. I don’t read JB either- it’s a bunch of nonsense.

Yes, Alex is a rape apologist but doesn’t even care about that fact. In Alex’s mind, they’re only cis women and the right of trans people to be their true selves is just infinitely more important.

I've made a dog fox/vixen tweet, pointing out that Alex Sharpe presumably thinks mankind means just men.

Still don't really understand the details of how Twitter works, but that isn't stopping me.

Do you even make a tweet or do you just tweet? And should Tweet be capitalized? This sort of thing matters to me. I'm persnickety about language. That and ethics. The rest of my environment? Not so much.

Yes, I saw, Prawn. Some very good points. I wish I could like them but...
You don't have to worry too much about language- I don't tend to capitalise the word tweet. You can either create a new tweet, retweet someone else's with a comment, or reply to an existing tweet. Hashtags help improve visibility. You can create a thread of tweets by replying to your own ones, if you want to say something longer than the character limit.

You can create a thread of tweets by replying to your own ones, if you want to say something longer than the character limit.

I wondered how people did that, Susan. Thanks for all your advice.

I do worry for Sophie Allen, Alex seems to have a lot of clout.
Thinking back, my DD pondered doing Law at Keele before she did Maths + PGCE elsewhere, I’m very glad she didn’t .

I’m still reeling at ‘challenging the idea that sexual autonomy be viewed as an absolute right ‘. It one of the creepiest, most manipulative things I have ever read - and from a law professor?

Well, this is at least making me consider reading some Judith Butler, as Alex Sharpe's writing is so poor.

But... they're really shit! Just read another AS article, in the New Statesman, which uses exactly the same crappy bits of 'evidence' as this, plus lots of metaphors, unsupported assertions and insults. And spelling mistakes, but that's the sub's fault (they should really get someone to proofread their blog).

I keep deciding to back away from all this, that i don't know what I'm talking about and should leave well alone. But how can an editor PUBLISH this stuff and hold their head up?

PlatypusPie points to a real fundamental here. Sharpe's incoherence about gender and sex is certainly significant here, but I think it is enormous that they have said so openly that sexual autonomy as a right should be challenged and it not blown up their face as it rightly should.

We call much more obtuse reasoning rape apologise. This is straight down the line "Your absolute right to say no to sex is wrong." There is nothing someone can say that is more nakedly rapey than that. That deserves much more of a spotlight and all the oppobrium humanity can muster.

I agree, Floral. There should be much more outrage than there currently is. The statement is disgraceful.

Yes. It makes my blood run cold.

This is a truly horrible use of academic language to soften or hide a massive outrage. ‘Sexual automomy’ is the fundamental right a woman (or anyone) has to say with whom, when and how they engage in sexual activity. Removing ‘autonomy’ - means rape, child sexual abuse, and other forms of sexual assault become permissible. It’s disgusting.

There's a reflection on one of Alex Sharpe's seminars by two students that describes women being conned into sex by women who present themselves as men as "inadvertent sexual contact".

Inadvertent, FFS, as if it was the equivalent of stepping in a puddle.

Creepy and rapey as fuck. The rest of the material these kids are regurgitating is nearly as bad.

I spotted this on the Matt Greenfield thread on Twitter

Fucking hell prawn. That reflection is terrifying. Alex Sharpe makes their legal thinking sound completely psychopathic. Almost approving of the assertion that men who find they are having sex with a transwoman choose non-judicial responses - doesn't that imply violence? Whereas the silly women who don't want to have sex with a woman are in fact suffering from 'repressed lesbian desire' and removing the transmen's right to privacy by asserting their feelings of wanting to know who they have gone to bed with. Appatently because you can't know everything about someone it's not fraud not to know what sex they are. Christ.

Janice Turner has responded to Sharpe on Twitter (sorry, don't know how to link or take image - I hate Twitter) but it's in her tweets and replies section.

This is a gem of a put down:

Your insistence male rapists should be allowed near women is v telling & utterly disgusting.

Yes, Janice, very telling when that insistence comes from a late transitioning male. Thank you.

I'm sensing that creepy hidden agenda behind the cult again....

Something that Sharpe doesn't seem to grasp in their triumphant 'let's just risk assess' argument is that there WAS no doubt a risk assessment carried out re Karen White. I mean the guidance states that dangerous prisoners do need to be risk assessed, and certainly those who are trans and do not have a GRC. The point is that despite that guidance, a dangerous male was placed in the female estate. That is because men as a sex class (regardless of identity) are inherently a risk to women as a sex class. No, not ALL men. But it is not feasible or possible to conduct an accurate assessment on every single male to determine whether or not he is a risk to women. The information is simply not there- someone could be a huge risk, yet have no convictions for violence against women. If we are to risk-assess every trans woman, we should do so for all men, because there are plenty of men who are safe around women (even prisoners). That is why this argument will never ever stand up to any sort of scrutiny. We segregate based on biological sex, not some vague notion of gender identity. That is the ONLY basis segregation can ever make sense. Crime patterns are sexed and those with a female gender identity conform to their biological sex, not the one they identify with.

To even entertain the argument that Sharpe is making, there would need to be clear evidence that having a female gender identity makes a male adopt female patterns of offending. The evidence suggests the opposite is true. The argument that 'trans kids might kill themselves if we don't do this' is such a weak one. Children with gender dysphoria have a similar rate of suicidality as other children with mental health conditions.