the claimant has lived as a woman in prison for the last eight years
the fact that the claimant's real life experience (as a woman) has been acquired in prison
As a woman, with the protected characteristic of sex, I find those statements - and all the references to the prisoner as “she” - not just deeply, deeply offensive but a form of misogynistic hate speech.
I am a member of the female sex class that has been dominated, victimised , abused, controlled, exploited, oppressed by the male sex class for countless generations, going back thousands of years, across the whole globe. This oppression has not ended (though even if it had, its effects would still be felt for a long time afterwards owing to the depth and extent of the phenomenon); it is still very much current - most obviously in some parts of the developing world but also right here in the western world, albeit more covertly.
As such, for a male person to appropriate “womanhood”, and claim entitlement to and ownership of the term “woman”, is itself an act of extreme oppression, one which is a direct result of male privilege. Forcing women - actual adult human females - to refer to this prisoner and others as “she” is an act of coercive control, an act of oppression.
It clearly demonstrates where the true power lies.
The reach of trans rights activists is such that all MSM outlets now routinely refer to male individuals like this as “she” and “women”. Feminists are routinely banned on the male-owned platforms of Twitter and Facebook simply for stating biological and sociological reality. Even on this female-owned and dominated site, we risk deletion and banning for correctly identifying the sex of those we know to be male, of the male sex, that is the oppressor class.
The reach of patriarchy is such that large numbers of women are colluding in this further subordination of our sex. There again we see evidence of the power differential that is an inevitable legacy of thousands of years of women doing whatever they can to survive in patriarchal society, much like the phenomenal success among women of Fifty Shades of Grey shows just how deeply, as a sex, we have internalised masochism as an acceptable and even desirable state of internal being.
Abuse survivors who engage in healing understand with retrospect that denial is our chief survival mechanism when we are absolutely powerless to change the situation we are in. Women as a group have been being abused by men as a group, throughout recorded history, and were completely powerless to change our situation in too, too many circumstances, for far, far too long. Denial was the only way to survive it.
But breaking down that denial is the only way forward. It is something we have to do if we ever want to see a world where women - female people - are accorded the same fully human status as men - male people in society, in everyone’s hearts, minds, and crucially, unconscious.
As an abuse survivor who grew up in a world where lies reigned supreme, I know the value of truth, and I know how crucial it is to genuine progress on a personal level. It is the same on a societal level. We will make no progress as long as we force people to lie, especially if we force women to lie. The idea that this prisoner has been “living as a woman” is an abhorrent lie that reduces “womanhood” down to nothing more than hair, clothing, make up, a feeling in a man’s head; that denies the reality of our lived experience and the infinite number of ways in which an adult human female in a free society can live.
Please @MNHQ @JustineMumsnet think about this. Think about the fact you’re forcing women to lie, to be complicit in our own abuse, our own oppression. Think what that means in a world where power is still concentrated in male hands. Think what a beacon you could be for truth, justice, true progress if you stopped forcing women to lie about the sex of our oppressors, about the reality of our oppression. It would truly be a huge step forward.