Transwomen in women's prisons - what's the problem?

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This is one of the many fraught conversations I've had with a friend recently. She acknowledges incidents happen where a TW harms a female inmate, and agrees that is terribly wrong. However, where I say the problem is that the TW s claimed gender identity is prioritised over their sex, she says the prison system should be better at screening prisoners as often these incidents involve a TW who has previously been a risk to women, so, why were they housed with women?
She does have a point, but I think that gender identity based policies makes it hard to put this kind of screening in place... I'm finding it hard to argue it though, so maybe I'm just wrong. Thoughts?

Does your friend understand that she is advocating for mixed sex prisons? What does she think is likely to happen to women in mixed sex prisons? Why does she think one of the Geneva conventions is single sex housing for prisoners of war and why don't women in peace time deserve the same?

Why can't she extend the same concern for women that she is exhibiting for men?

This is a salutary article - I feel for this woman, but what do people expect?

www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/464580/corrections-have-not-followed-process-at-all-for-trans-prisoner

And this comment from Twitter in response to the posting of the above article.

It's happened occasionally in Oz but I also found a case with a TIF who asked to be put in the women's & was refused. She attempted suicide after being raped in the men's division.

Many.,many women - including TiFs - have no idea what we are getting into, and what sort of Brave New World we are going to be living in.

No. She doesn't have a point. Males, whether low level petty criminals or mass murderers, rapists or paedophiles, should not be housed in women's prisons. Ever. No screening required.

Someone tweeted yesterday that 50% of TIM are convicted of sex offences, I can't remember the percentage of general population that are sex offenders.

Now it was a tweet so could be totally made up, but if it isn't then that should be a warning.

Here you go: committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/

I think it is 50% in the USA, but 60% in the UK at the latest figures earlier this year...compared to 18% of non trans identified males in prison.

We don't know the % of the general population because rape and sexual offending is pretty much a de-regulated offence. So very little gets reported, let alone investigated or pursued through the courts.

Ancient research i have fois for every single year & there are two problems:
> Understanding statistics takes more than a sound-bite
> the unwillingness of women to address the Maths ditto lawyers MOJ & ONS
> barking up the wrong comparative tree - sex segregation works because asult females are seldom violent & almost never to other adult females.

IF you want to solve it, get all these feminists orgs to put on workshops about the right stats & how to use them. & stop confus8ng social media popularity & catchy sound bites & apply your self to some fairly basic...Maths. Rishi is right i have had the evidence for 4.5 yrs but nobody will listen because it isnt a sound-bites.

Here is an accurate crunching of the 2021 Census data...the 48,000 does not include all the males in the "nonbinaries +×+" which means 48,000 is a vast underestimate & seems to produce a stratospherically highrate of sexual offending.

That 50% is meaningless without a full statement of what it is 50% of!
It is 50% of Sentenced prison population and compares with 20% of male prisoners and 3.3% of a tiny female prison population.
The thing is we know that even violent TWs are NOT being sent to prison because magistrates & judges fall for this nonsense this you will get a higher proportion. It is a kind of measure but there are better ones.
If you want any help with understanding these stats u can always ask me or lets just have a seminar.
A pity nobody listened to me back in 2018 bcos i have had the evidence of a mathematical analyst since then. I dont understand why women often seem to be their own worst enemies. It is heartbreaking.

I am not on social media so much because i am doing the boring legwork to make sure the evidence is presented onto desk of every single mp by next election and...i cd sure use some help.

I think I’d say to that friend:

Whose rights, privacy, dignity and safety do you want to protect?

All women prisoners.

Or some trans women who do not suffer the same vulnerability as women around men, but want to be given the same rights as those women. (It’s different if they say that they are vulnerable as trans women, then accommodations can be made in a men’s prison for that vulnerability).

Because it genuinely can’t be both and it is exhausting having to endlessly justify this. This is why we don’t have mixed prisons. There are many reasons which do not go away just because a man says he’s a woman. They just don’t.

Again I feel very frustrated that it’s up to women to justify ‘why not’. Rather than on trans women allies to justify in a way that satisfies the more vulnerable population, women, whose rights are being impinged.

@Pommie69 I think clear examples of real life are very much sound bites however. I do have a good understanding of statistics which do show that harm to women exists as much from TW as it does from men who do not present as TW.

However look at the TW in Ireland in the prison - it doesn’t take much of a good search. It’s truly horrifying that someone with so many offenses against women can now be housed in a women’s prison. You will hardly see it reported or talked about in the media or in Ireland. It’s like the female prisoners don’t matter.

Pommie is very much against males in female prisons. I believe what she is trying to get as close to a fair representation as possible. I know she has been crunching these numbers as she says and she does do FOIs each year.

I am sure she will clarify when she comes back to the thread.

Apologies, I may have written it badly, but I was supportive of @Pommie69 as in, I knew she was backing up with maths, which is valuable and important, but also trying to make her feel a bit better by saying that maths plus a really clear real life example is quite powerful and would indeed make a sound bite. Maths is the backbone, stories are what sticks in people’s minds. I probably didn’t articulate it very well! But I do appreciate the work that she and others have put in to support women prisoners.

Sorry walkthisway, I misread your post then.

Even if you generously disregarded the difference in crime patterns, the size differences in size… One sex can get pregnant from sexual intercourse and one sex does the impregnating.

But sure, lets just lump them all in together…. Who deals with the offspring that will inevitably occur? Do female prisoners have to get state mandated BC, or do we ensure sterilisation? Maybe ‘just’ state mandated abortions? Or do they get carry their pregnancy and all related health risks/stresses through a custodial sentence?

What about when a baby is born? Does the baby get to stay in the mixed sex prison with their mother or do/when will they get separated?

What about the mental health of both mother and child? Who pays for the damage of separation?

what about the TW who's in mental distress [...] Why should those individuals suffer, just because some TW are a danger?

Why should every single woman be put in increased danger, suffer fear and distress, and be deprived of even more privacy and dignity than they already are in prison, just because some men are unhappy?

TW may sometimes be vulnerable in male prisons. Not always - this one raped, tortured, pimped out & murdered a man with developmental delay www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-who-raped-9-yr-old-girls-raped-killed-a-man-elicits-media-sympathy-for-his-cause-patricia-trimble/

But they are not the only males who are vulnerable: paedophiles, young men, men with learning difficulties, convicted police & prison officers etc are vulnerable to attack too.

For decades male prisons have accommodated them - it used to be called “taking the numbers” as prisoners could invoke a particular code.

There was one prison which had solely sex offenders (I don’t know if it still is).

Prisoners who claim to be trans are accommodated too - that might be why so many claim a trans identity they drop after release: cells to themselves, separate times to shower & so on.

This is where the case-by-case assessment should be done. In the men’s estate. Because that’s the category they belong to.

Just on practical terms, there are about 12,000 male sex offenders in prison in England & Wales. That’s 4 times the number of ALL women prisoners, for any offence. How many men transferring to women’s prisons is too many?

I’d say 1 is too many.

There was one prison which had solely sex offenders (I don’t know if it still is).

HMP Bure, and yes it is.

Some excellent thoughts on this OP, and something to listen to in general. Helen Joyce makes the point (which I think is an important one) that men who consider themselves/claim to be women are not uniquely vulnerable in prison, other groups such as gay men, young men...are also vulnerable, and we don't house them in the female estate.

Also, men who identify as women so to gain access to women in the women's prison often stop saying they are women when they leave prison. They return to 'living life as a man', when their sentence is complete.

if they’ve been through the complete transition surgery fair enough, but men with penises masquerading as women should not be allowed in womens prisons, end of.

What do you mean by 'transition surgery'? Your sex is set at (well, before) birth and cannot be changed.

If a man has had penile cancer and had to have it removed, or an orchidectomy, should he be considered transitioned and thus female? If a woman has had a hysterectomy or oophorectomy, does that make her automatically transitioned (against her will) and thus male?

Just because a body part is usually a clear marker of somebody's sex, that doesn't mean that the absence of that body part means they must therefore be/become the opposite sex - any more than somebody who has had to have a leg amputated could be described as somehow 'not human, because humans have two legs'. These are very offensive proclamations to be making.

This. Why do you think these men are in prison in the first place? The offending patterns are of far harder crimes than the female estate and these are just the crime/crimes they've been found guilty of.

I'm sorry your friend can't seem to centre women and their wellbeing within their own single sex facility and seemingly has no idea about the reality of offenders and prisons.

Also, we recently had a case of a pregnant female inmate from a TiM housed in the same facility. Do you think this is ethical for all involved including the baby?

On the situation in Ireland. Paddy O'Gorman has spent 40 years interviewing people in tough situations and broadcasting their words without editorialising or bringing in spokespeople. In this podcast he lets a woman recently released from Limerick Women's prison talk about how the experience was affected by the presence of the transwomen prisoners.

Spoiler - grimmer than it needed to be for the women, the transwomen and the prison staff.

paddyspodcast.ie/episodes-3/

One encouraging thing from the UK census figures is that the numbers of trans individuals is so low that one prison should be enough for all of them - in Ireland they are probably seen as too low for that solution - but wtf is it always the women who have to adjust?

She does have a point, but I think that gender identity based policies makes it hard to put this kind of screening in place... I'm finding it hard to argue it though, so maybe I'm just wrong. Thoughts?

Of course you're not wrong. Being male is the single biggest risk factor that should be used to "screen" prisoners. Being a criminal is another huge risk factor. If you aren't allowed to apply the simple rule "women should not be locked up with male criminals" of course the screening process is going to fail all the time.

There IS harm and I have the evidence for that so...why dont we use it? Instead of these nonsense fantastical mathematically nonsense calculations by people who have clearly NOT read the ONS & MOJ definitions carefully enough and imagine that 48,000 transwomen from ONS can be used with 81 transgenmder sexual offenders (2019) from the MOJ. I lterally have all the fois for all the years since 2016. My point is that catcjhy sound-bites have taken over from real objective anaylsis...which the media certainly arent interested in.
I have had the hard solid evidence since 2018, I gave it to Caroline Lucas MP on 2 Nov 2018 and she should have passed it directly to the MOJ and the Justice committee.

We are now in an insane competition of who can make the most outrageous sound-bite which PREVENTS the authorities realising that the hard evidence exists and is already sitting in ONS & MOJ databases.

I have done 5 years work on this, so why are all my offers to do workshops & talks turned DOWN by GC feminist organisations?

WHY arent all the organisation coming right to my door?

It was on Sheppey.

Bure is newish - it was Coltishall Airbase.