TW in Women's prisons - Zoe Williams' Take

[IcakethereforeIam]

You may wish to put away your breakables

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/01/trans-rights-prison-rarely-defended

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.

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

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? 🤣

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.

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’.

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!

Although the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply, the UN has rules stating that male and female prisoners should be segregated: https://womansplaceuk.org/2023/03/01/new-moj-transgender-prisoner-policy-wpuk-statement/

Logic really isn't her strong suit, is it?

I assumed, furthermore, that the figures would ultimately speak for themselves, but that was wrong. There were 97 sexual assaults in women’s prisons between 2016 and 2020 – seven involved trans prisoners.

Surely those figures do speak for themselves. As far as I'm concerned, 7 assaults by male prisoners in female prisons is 7 too many. But not for Zoe. If male trans prisoners weren't in women's prisons, then 7 assaults on women wouldn't have happened. That's 7 women who wouldn't have been assaulted and traumatised. Why don't you care about what happened to those 7 women, Zoe? Are there not enough of them for you to care about? How many would be enough?

Since the prison regulation on trans prisoners was reformed in 2019, (which made it more difficult for those convicted of any violent crime to switch between estates) there have been no assaults by trans prisoners on women in prison. It seems pretty obvious that if the majority of sexual assaults in the women’s estate are committed by prisoners who are not trans, then a relentless focus on trans prisoners is not going to keep women safe.

On the contrary, it seems pretty obvious to me that if keeping males out of female prisons means that they can't assault female prisoners, then continuing to keep them out of women's prisons is a good idea. It's certainly not a good argument for letting them back in.

A response to Zoe’s article in the Twitter responses makes the excellent point that, even if all the 90 assaults were by women ( and we don’t know that they are, they could have been by male officers, males with GRCs,) then that 90 is a small number out of thousands of women prisoners, whereas 7 assaults by a single-digit handful of males with trans identities is a huge proportion, showing that male trans prisoners are a vastly, vastly greater risk to women prisoners than other women. So the figures actually evidence the opposite of what Zoe claims they do.

And of course, those are only recorded assaults. That says nothing about the fear or intimidation women prisoners may feel.

Logic really isn't her strong suit, is it?

I'm not sure anything is.

It's the exact same argument as used in sport isn't it?

"It's only a few men pushing women off podiums so why does it matter and what about all the other abuses happening in women's sports why don't you care about those and look there's a squirrel"

I've been gagging for a chance to post this

can it really true that there were 6 trans women in the female estate and 7 assaults by them over a shortish period? in other words, crudely speaking, even assuming a 100% reporting of assaults, the average TW prisoner in a women's prison is likelier than not to carry out an assault/will carry out 1.17 assaults each? I'm at a loss to articulate the level of madness that we're dealing with here.

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!

Heh, good analogy, although I doubt the TRAs would like it.

This has been bothering me for a while but people (Zoe included) keep talking about "the number of transwomen in women's prison" etc etc. As I understand it those statistics DON'T refer to the number of transwomen/trans people - but to the number of people whose identity doesn't match their legal sex - so those WITHOUT a GRC in other words. Now, given how tiny the population of UK residents with a GRC is, that probably doesn't make much overall difference to the prison numbers but it is frustrating because if Zoe and the TRAs got their way and passed self ID laws then we could see the number of "prisoners whose legal sex doesn't match their identity" drop to 0. But of course that would be bollocks.

I don’t think you can extrapolate figures in the general population to figures in prison. I’d guess there are a lot more inmates studying for an open university degree than would be the case in the same population when not incarcerated. The same may be true about applying for a GRC. Who knows what people are likely to get up to when they have so much time in their hands and a clear benefit to getting one?

Now, given how tiny the population of UK residents with a GRC is

Figures from KPSS suggest that a disproportionately high number in relation to what would be expected from the number in the population are in prison.

I don’t understand what she is trying to say in this article at all

There isn't much to understand. Women, however vulnerable, don't matter to Zoe, and she's not good with statistics, is all you can really take from it.

Yes, it’s meaningless waffle. I don’t think I’ve ever really got the point of any of her articles tbh

The blithe, dumb privilege of women like Zoe seriously gets on my tits.

the midwittery of useful idiots virtue signalling

She's extraordinarily naive. There is literally nothing that a woman's body does that some guy, somewhere won't have a fetish about. Pregnancy, urination, limping, breastfeeding, and being confined. I suspect there was a small but avid male audience for shows like Prisoner Cell Block H, for which watching it was their <ahem> special time.

There's a case before the courts at the moment, men were being castrated to fulfill a fetish watched by an audience of other men. If some men are prepared to go that far....slapping on a dress and a bit of lippy for a prison fetish doesn't seem to much of a long stretch.

She doesn't care enough to inform herself.