Mary Harrington - Why are so many transgender prisoners sex offenders?

[RebelliousCow]

https://open.substack.com/pub/reactionaryfeminist/p/how-many-sex-offenders?r=clsg2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

No, it’s not my belief system. Please do not quote me out of context like that.
Enjoy your Sunday.

I don't want you to repeat answers to questions I haven't asked, I want you to answer (for the first time) the questions I have asked.

Your refusal to answer indicates that you have no idea how someone genuinely trans differs from someone faking it.

Neither does anyone else, it seems.

So we're stuck either the conundrum that some people are faking being trans but they are indistinguishable from the people who are really trans. Or perhaps its just that nobody is "really trans " and they're all faking it.

I feel I have already answered your question on the process by which we can discern someone who is genuinely trans from someone who is not genuine.

I have no difficulty reading repeat questions, I just do not feel compelled to post repeat answers. Discussions that go in circles tend to lose my interest.

Your disingenuous posts are making the discussion go in circles and derailing the thread from its original question. I suggest you answer the perfectly clear question you've been asked, or people will conclude you don't have anything particularly insightful to impart. I certainly have.

The original question:

Why are so many transgender prisoners sex offenders?

So we're stuck either the conundrum that some people are faking being trans but they are indistinguishable from the people who are really trans. Or perhaps its just that nobody is "really trans " and they're all faking it.

Exactly.

I don't believe you.

Have you? When did you do that? I thought I'd read all your posts but I must have missed that one. Surprising since that is the one question that I'd like an answer to.

Could you post a link to your post or give the approximate day/time and I'll go and have a look.

We have some measure of civilisation because humans are capable of and have the potential for, a measure of control, self discipline and the channeling of instinctive drives into productive channels. But we also have a multitude of wars going on at any one time; people attacking, murdering, raping, stealing, abusing, torturing other people, and other creatures. As you mention some people even abuse and kill their own young.

Human beings and human behaviour occupies the full range of light to shadow - and always will. Idealistic and dry academic or theoretical movements detached from the reality of human nature on Planet Earth will inevitably always be disappointed.

I'm wondering whether that particular poster actually has any experience of human nature.

.....and may well have been totally anaesthetised during the whole course of their pregnancies, childbirths, and the following years.

The point I already made, is that males aren't to blame for their early socialisation, they aren't to blame for the type of society that they grow up in. And it's very difficult for any individual to change their society.

So on the individual level, why isn't it going to "excuse men of their agency"? (If you think biology would do.)

Or you want to say that you aren't talking about personal responsibility?

Technically of course, we can change biology. It's not impossible, even if it's probably not desirable in general.

But we can also change society to mitigate the issues that may be partly encouraged by biology. So you don't become helpless as a society just because biology is a factor.

But even if we imagine that there is a difficulty here, that this is going to make it harder for society to fix the problem if biology is involved, well you can't object to something just because it makes things more difficult for society! That says very little about its truth.

So in what sense are you "excusing men of their agency" that anyone should care about?

So let's say someone male has the irrational delusion of a "woman identity". It's delusional but they are genuine in thinking it.

They have it long term.

They decide to embrace it and "transition".

That seems like a "genuine trans person" to me, as compared to someone that thinks, "I'm lying about this, but I want access to a female prison".

In the case of transvestites with a sexual motive, (fine if it was done in private), it's fucked up if they start doing it in public using a trans excuse.

If someone manages to actually turn themselves trans (they genuinely think they have a woman identity) from their porn addiction or whatever, sure it's fucked up, and the issue probably deserves research as to how much this is actually happening and whether such identities are as stable as people that transitioned young, or claim to have had gender dysphoria from a young age.

Maybe not all trans identities should be viewed as equally valid.

Speaking personally, I'm not going to say that there is "no such thing as genuine trans", (on the understanding that I'm talking about a delusion), and I wouldn't deny that "gender identity" makes sense as a concept.

I would say it's doubtful you can change gender. That is, it's doubtful that trans people can pass at the level of gender.

So they often can't pass on the level of sex, and they often don't seem to have authentic gender either.

Some people might say that doesn't matter because gender is just a social construct and it's fine to be non conforming to gender standards; but if all you have is "gender identity", it's a slim basis on which to make claims.

No one here has claimed that having influence from hormones and biology means that we have no self-awareness and merely follow instinctual patterns of behaviour. That's not what being affected by physiological responses means.

For that matter, many animals are not merely following instinctual patterns of behaviour, many have some capacity to reason and problem solve.

This does not mean that animal physiological responses do not influence behaviour, on an individual level, and on a population level. Sometimes profoundly.

You are way out of your depth on this and are making yourself look foolish.

I wouldn't say "weak" when it comes to behaviour or psychological impact.

But if they haven't embraced something it's not the same thing.

We know that sincere religious people struggle with homosexuality on plenty of occasions. Going from completely gay to completely straight I don't think is happening.

But I don't think we can rule out, that for some devotees, embracing religion may genuinely make one side of their sexuality disappear.

That seems like a "genuine trans person" to me, as compared to someone that thinks, "I'm lying about this, but I want access to a female prison".

That sort of "genuine trans person" is what is sometimes described as an old-school transsexual - the sort who has been around for decades. Someone like Jan Morris for example.

But when you look under the surface, those people don't really look any more genuine than the ones who have a more obvious sexual motive. Jan Morris's daughter, Suki Morys, has written (since her father's death) about what life was really like for her and her mother after her father's transition. Morris's womanliness was very superficial.

As Rebecca West wrote in her review of Morris's book Conundrum: "She sounds not like a woman, but like a man's idea of a women, and curiously enough, the idea of a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be."

I think this is an excellent description of what a transwoman is: Transwomen are men who are living as a man's idea of a woman. It doesn't matter how sincere their belief is that they are women or how much they claim to want to be women - they are no more like women than any other man. Whether or not their belief about their transness is genuine is completely irrelevant.

Well I just said, I doubt they have authentic gender. So I may agree with you on that.

However, I would certainly have sympathy for someone that has suffered gender dysphoria from childhood and where they are blameless for their identity.

If someone has a porn addiction, then just like an alcohol addiction, we may naturally feel less sympathy for the consequences.

Now maybe that's sometimes unfair and we don't know what life circumstances helped bring about the alcohol addiction in the first place.

But transvestitism/cross dressing is a sexual paraphilia by definition - and yet this group represents one of the biggest set of transitioners around. So many men coming out of the closet and leaving their wives to go " full time".

Look at the Beaumont Society as an example. It was originally a bona fide organisation for cross dressing men and their wives - now it is a fully fledged 'trans' organisation.

https://www.beaumontsociety.org.uk/our-history.html

To my mind the late transitioning cross dressers seen far more"stable" and long term committed then the early transitioners who suffered from dysphoria as teenagers.

There is a bloke on TikTok, served 9 years for aggravated sexual assault on a woman - leaving her for dead. This man now has a large (6k+) platform on TikTok where he goes 'live' every evening ... oh, and the point of my post is that he now identifies as a woman and gets thousands of followers fawning over him 😡

As far as I can see, you are talking about personal responsibility and personal blame or credit.

And I don't see how your position is consistent.

If a 21 year old man is violent, and the act flows automatically from their biology, then they aren't responsible for their biology. (Ignoring steroid use perhaps.)

But if the violent act flows automatically from socialisation, they also aren't (largely) responsible for how they have been socialised in that society.

The way you get personal responsibility, isn't by insisting, "it has to be socialisation rather than a mix of socialisation and biology".

Rather, you need to say that there is an agent that may be influenced, but isn't controlled, by either socialisation or biology.

Another important point is that it was transsexuals who pushed for the term transgender to replace transvestite and transsexual so that the two categories couldn't be separated.

This is from the 2007 submission to Parliament by Press for Change (Christine Burns, Stephen Whittle)

Transgender is an umbrella term, coined in America, used to include people whose lifestyles appear to conflict with the gender norms of society. It includes many types of people and lifestyles. In the broadest use of the term, a transgender person crosses the conventional boundaries of gender; in clothing; in presenting themselves; even as far as having multiple surgical procedures to be fully bodily reassigned in their preferred gender role.

In this report we will normally use the term 'trans people' to describe those people who might be described as falling broadly within this context, as it has become the term of normal use since the coining of it by Press for Change for their 1996 mission statement: "Seeking respect and equality for ALL trans people"[2]. People who identify as transsexual are a small part of this spectrum and may or may not have had medical treatment to alter their physical appearance.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmpublic/criminal/memos/ucm39102.htm

I think they were just acknowledging that there is little to no difference between men who identify as transvestites and men who identify as transsexual.

I've mentioned this numerous times before, but there is an excellent documentary on Netflix called 'Regretters'. It is a Swedish production and involves two long term MTF transitioners who both had 'full' re-assignment surgery decades ago.

One was one of the first transsesexuals in the 1960's. He was a slight, gay man at a time when being gay was not only unacceptable, but illegal too. Basically he wanted to be loved by a man, in the way he saw women being loved by men. He was even married to a man for 10 years ( he claims his husband did not know he was a transsexual until the end of the marriage).

The other transitioner was a classic AGP who " decided If the women i really like do not want me, then I'll become that woman myself". His model of masculinity ( his father) was one of violence, brutality and lack of love. He wanted to be with women - but they didn't seem attracted to him - so he 'became a woman' himself.

Both men were now at the stage of detransitioning after many, many years of 'living as a woman'. Both had insight in to why they transitioned in the first place, and both were now very aware they were not women and never could be women. They were both going as far as having a new penis constructed.

Both of these men were " genuinely" trans - but for quite different reasons.

There does seem, in my experience, to be a differernt mechanism involved with gay men rather than straight men. Particularly in the past, many seem to come from a place where living as a gay man, or even simply living as a celibate and avoiding labels, was not something they could be comfortable with.

Part of that, I suspect, relates to the same mechanism that prompts young heterosexual people to try, to a greater or lesser extent, to fit into the shape that the opposite sex finds attractive in their society. One of the things we know about kids who don't feel connected with their sexed bodies is that in adolescence, when they start to feel attracted to others, becoming an object of attraction can make them connect more positively with their bodies.

Kids with sexual trauma sometimes find that makes it worse. And I suspect that for some kids who see their adult body as beginning to make them unattractive to many of their target sex, it can have a similar effect. The social markers that they see as attracting those people are going to be feminine rather than masculine.

Many people work this out over time, but some don't seem to. But this seems quite different than AGP to me.

GuanYinShanxi believes that it is mainly paedophiles who would falsely claim to be trans in order to try to get accommodated in a Women's Prison.

By "paedophiles" I assume GuanYin means "men who have been convicted of sexually assaulting and raping children", which will certainly include paedophiles but it is not only paedophiles who sexually assault and rape children. This is an important distinction.

Firstly, "paedophilia" is not a criminal offence, it is a psychiatric diagnosis. Similarly with men who rape elderly women: it is generally recognised that they have chosen their victims for their vulnerability, rather than because the rapists are "gerontophiles".

Secondly, some people disgustingly suggest that it is OK to incarcerate men convicted of sex crimes against children in Women's Prisons because they are "paedophiles" and therefore of no danger to adult women. It is not OK to incarcerate any man in a Women's Prison but this argument is flawed anyway because many men who commit sex crimes against children are not "paedophiles", they are sexual sadists and opportunists.

eg. Bestiality seems to be quite popular with trans sex offenders
https://transcrimeuk.com/category/sexual-offences/bestiality/

Finally, possession of child abuse materials has been found to be a better predictor of paedophilia than actual sex attacks on children. This is not to say that paedophiles do not attack children but that men who sexually assault and rape children are less likely to be paedophiles than men who "only" or also collect child abuse materials.

Anyway, GuanYinShanxi has not presented any data to support the hypothesis that men convicted of sex crimes against children are more likely to be "fake trans" than "real trans" and that they "fake being trans" in order to be transferred to a Women's Prison for their own protection. These men are also normally housed in separate accommodation on the Men's Prison Estate if they are at risk of violence from other prisoners so they are already given protection by the prison service.

However, it would still be useful to know how many male prisoners claiming to be trans have been convicted of sex offences against children.

Something we do know is that judges sometimes chose not to sentence some trans males (and females) to prison, for the very reason that they are "trans", whether:

• taking "struggling with gender identity issues" in mitigation
• or stating that the perpetrator would be "vulnerable" in prison because they are trans (ignoring that the prison service protects "vulnerable" prisoners)
• or that they don't know whether they should be sentenced to a Men's or Women's prison - even though it is not judges who make that decision.

Maybe judges are equally reluctant to sentence some "non-trans" convicted sex offenders to prison and give other reasons for leniency?

Something else we know is that trans advocacy organisations such as Press For Change have been lobbying since at least the mid 1990's for "trans offenders" to be spared prison, ie. in circumstances where others would be incarcerated. Also that they and other "trans advocates" have been training the judiciary for decades.

As Old Crone has pointed out, Press for Change's broad definition of "trans people" in 1996, encompassing cross-dressers, has been widely adopted. Transvestites who adopt a female name and stereotypical female garb in the gap between arrest and court appearance are considered by the MOJ to be "transgender women" if they say so.

Although all that is actually required are the magic words, "I am trans" or "I identify as a woman": that is all that the perp does in some cases. No splashing out on a "Woman Wardrobe", adopting a different name or shaving off the beard for convicted "transgender woman" sex offender Stuart Bulling:

https://transcrimeuk.com/2023/06/25/stuart-bulling/

The most high profile case of a trans cross-dresser criminal is that of Jamie Wallis MP, who has not even bothered to change his name, still uses male pronouns and goes to work at Parliament dressed like any other bloke.

When arrested for a driving offence he was dressed in such a way that a bystander said he thought he saw, "a prostitute running up the road". Jamie says he is "trans" so therefore he is trans and he was charged, prosecuted and convicted in the same name he was elected to Parliament: no "Jessica" or "Tiffany" for Jamie.

Jamie is not "pretending to be trans" because "trans" includes cross-dressers. He does not have to claim to be a woman to qualify as "trans", although should he at some point be given a prison sentence perhaps the old "identifying as a woman" option will kick in?

Going back to the original question, "Why are so many transgender prisoners sex offenders?" and bearing in mind the stats workups

by Signalbox
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4896553-mary-harrington-why-are-so-many-transgender-prisoners-sex-offenders?page=2&reply=129232460

and Old Crone
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4896553-mary-harrington-why-are-so-many-transgender-prisoners-sex-offenders?page=2&reply=129232765

We are talking about males in this instance because a similar analysis has not been done for females.

Is a male who claims to be trans who is living in the community more or less or equally likely as any other male living in the community to be a sex offender, including offences against children?

Given that judges are known to be lenient with "trans people" and sometimes spare a "trans person" a prison sentence when they have been convicted of a sex crime, including against children, we know that there are convicted sex offenders who are trans who are given a community order sentence when non-trans offenders would have been committed to prison.

This means that the figures produced by Signalbox and OldCrone are probably an under-estimation of the number of trans sex offenders because they are based on prison stats, ie. they do not include convicted trans sex-offenders who were given a non-custodial sentence in circumstances where a non-trans perp would have been sentenced to prison.

The "Get Out of Jail Free" tag on TransCrimeUK is not a reliable "count the heads" indicator because
a) it does not include all trans sex offenders who were spared a prison sentence explicitly for a "trans-related reason", and
b) most of those listed have multiple convictions and the "Get Out of Jail Free" tag might have been applied in relation to a crime that was not prosecuted under the Sexual Offences Act.

Here is the list if anyone wants to trawl through it (there are currently three pages, click "Older posts" at the bottom of the first two pages)

https://transcrimeuk.com/tag/get-out-of-jail-free-card/

Those tagged "Get Out of Jail Free" who have been convicted of sex crimes are highlighted in the images attached.