Women's jail campaigners demand transmen offenders should be kept in female prisons *Title edited at OP's request*

[IwantToRetire]

Women's jail campaigners are demanding that the growing number of trans male offenders should be kept in female jails.

Dr Kate Coleman, of Keep Prisons Single Sex, said that the instances of women identifying as men mid-sentence is a “growing problem”.

But she believes that such prisoners should be treated as women - and that moving them to men’s prisons or a special “trans unit” would be misguided and dangerous.

“Whilst the focus, rightly in my view, has been on the risks that males who identify as transgender pose to women in prison, the challenges of adequately and appropriately meeting the needs of females who identify as transgender must be addressed.

“These needs must be met within the female estate.

“I understand that females who identify as men are difficult to manage.

“But there is no quandary about where to house her. She is female and belongs in the female estate. She must be managed in a way that is continuous with the way in which all other female prisoners are managed. Housing her in the male estate is not even a question that should be asked.

“This is for her own safety and for her own benefit as it is in the female estate that she will be able to access the services and programmes that are necessary for her to progress.”

NB Only extracts, NOT the whole article which can be read in full at https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/womens-jail-campaigners-demand-trans-33750904

It erases the biological fact of sex and turns it into an opinion.

Well, it purports to.

Plus clearly 5ARD men don’t belong in the women’s prison estate, just because someone was a bit too hasty with their birth paperwork.

If they continued the violence against women and girls that is the destruction of language applicable to us and therefore the ability to talk about ourselves, our oppression, our risks, our harms as a sex?

That's why I keep using "observed female at birth" or "biologically female. You can't alter an observed fact.

‘Biologically female’ suggests there are other ways to be female. Transactivists then simply claim ‘biological’; many already do.

I'm not sure how we make it clear that we mean "has a developed Mullerian duct and atrophied Wolffian duct" otherwise.

I think we have to just take a stand and use the correct language and speak out against incorrect use of language. Make it clear that far from being a courtesy to a man who identifies as trans, it is incredibly offensive to women to steal our language this was.

To constantly back up just means we are allowing more and more words to be stolen: woman, female, biological…. There is no reason to think Müllerian duct won’t be stolen as well. The theft of language is violence against women and girls.

And where they can't steal the language they describe using it as transphobic. 'Biological woman' I've seen appropriated and called transphobic. I'm sure if the use of 'uterus havers', 'bleeders' or 'menstruators' had become accepted, there would have been outcries of transphobia or exclusion. I think the only reason there hasn't is because they enjoy seeing how offensive women find these phrases. Any words to describe women that excludes transwomen that we're comfortable with will be appropriated or condemned.

I’ve deffo seen uterus havers/penis people decried as terfy of late…

… Yes mate! We use it ironically to take the piss out of the TRAs who demanded we stop using our own, normal, well defined, sense making words.

Some of the things they complain about seem petty, from both sides; hair length, beards, underwear.

I disagree. There's a strong correlation between autism and gender dysphoria amongst women and all of hair length, shaving, and underwear can cause sensory problems for autistic people.

What's interesting in that case is how the press, who usually bend over backwards to she/her a man who says he's a woman, used she/her and "woman" to refer to this woman who says she's a man. It's almost like men's feelings trump facts and women's feelings don't.

Every day's a school day on here, but ' a developed Mullerian duct and atrophied Wolffian duct' is going to keep me busy on google for a long time!

Is 'DMD+AWD' the new AFAB??

My not-very-snappy definition of a woman when arguing about terminology is: someone who has, or who has had, a majority of the following:
xx chromosomes, a uterus, a clitoris, periods, and a girlhood.
I think it works, but I'm sure somebody will point out its inadequacies.

Or just 'woman, in the traditional sense of the word'.
Or 'biological female' - I'm not bothered that it implies there's a non-biological version, because there isn't.

Maybe we should apply for copyright and make it "Woman(TM)"!

I read a clinical case study of a baby boy with XX/XY chimerism. He had a testicle, vas deferens, penis, scrotum... and where the other testicle should have been, an ovary, with a fallopian tube that led to a partially-formed uterine horn in his abdomen.

The female organs were removed to prevent future health problems caused by a) having female sexual organs in the presence of an entire bollock's worth of testosterone, b) having male sexual organs in the presence of an ovary's worth of female hormones, and c) having part of a uterus without a vagina for menses to exit via.

The baby should be able to father children later in life with his remaining sexual organs and would never have been able to support a pregnancy, so not a girl, despite fitting your definition of female through having XX, an ovary, and part of a uterus.

In the boy's case, the Wolffian duct had mostly developed and the Mullerian duct mostly atrophied, hence the externally-male genitalia, the ovary in the scrotum, and only a small part of a uterus developing.

The pettiness is mostly on the part of the prison authorities. Seems a strange hill to die on considering the genuine problems in prisons. Nothing in the article said the tm were ND, if they aren't then they're being petty. Although I've seen loads of men who are clean shaven and/or have long hair. Trans as stereotypes strikes again.

I came up with one for Twitter.

"A woman is an adult human of the biological sex class which, in the absence of disorders of sexual development or other infertility, has the potential to conceive, gestate and birth children between the menarche and the menopause."

My point is that it's disproportionately likely that any TM in prison is autistic, not that the ones in this article definitely are.

Many autistic women aren't diagnosed until adulthood, if ever, so absence of a statement that someone is autistic doesn't prove neurotypicity.

All other issues aside, what is the evidential basis for claiming that biological sex is unchangeable?

Apart from hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution, you mean?

I wonder how many transmen there are who are in prison and desperately want to be in the male estate.

Can't help but think it's less than the number of transwomen desperate to get into the female estate.

I feel like we need to start using Tif, trans identifying female rather than trans man but of course she should be in the female estate. It’s like locking a chicken up with a bunch of foxes otherwise .

Sex change surgeries are a recent innovation. So yes, apart from that.

Are you suggesting that extreme body modification to create a poor facsimile of the opposite sex actually changes somebody's sex? Seriously?

BTW, did you notice that this thread hadn't been posted on for 9 months before you dragged it back from the dead?

Except, of course, these surgeries do not CHANGE sex, they merely try to SIMULATE THE APPEARANCE of the secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex. But the patient remains the sex they were at conception.

Is there a reason you resurrected a zombie thread, @Cassandrazone? Didn't have the confidence to start a new thread with your comment "All other issues aside, what is the evidential basis for claiming that biological sex is unchangeable?". (In other news, the Pope is Catholic and bears do indeed shit in the woods.)

Well we know that it’s not for certain species. Obviously if you are a clownfish, barramundi, frog etc, then you might be capable of changing sex. We know humans don’t change sex because of science.