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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Scots prisons should offer taxpayer-funded wardrobe with women's clothing for transgender prisoners says watchdog

36 replies

SeethingHarpie · 10/04/2025 14:12

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/scots-prisons-should-offer-taxpayer-35025435

How on earth can people in positions of authority and (supposed) safeguarding make such decisions and recommendations? I seriously do not understand the priorities - it is apparently more important that TIMs get access to women’s clothes and spaces than it is to offer basic human rights and safety to women?

Scots prisons should offer taxpayer-funded wardrobe for transgender prisoners

The HM Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland (HMIPS) recommended the creation of a wardrobe of women's clothing for trans prisoners to easy access.

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/scots-prisons-should-offer-taxpayer-35025435

OP posts:
Floisme · 11/04/2025 09:26

napody · 11/04/2025 06:53

If a transwoman is in a male prison (as they should be) I'm fine with them having access to some clothes tbh. Don't feel the need to stick the boot in - loss of liberty is the punishment.

I think it's best to focus on the actual issue (women's safety and diginity) - jumping with outrage because the daily express told you to is a dangerous path to go down.

Your post did make me stop and think, but I believe that, at best, the prison inspectors' recommendation feeds the deeply sexist narrative that a transwoman is trapped in the wrong body and furthermore that the taxpayer has some kind of responsibility to support them on their 'transgender journey'. So no, I don't think this is harmless, I'm not fine with it and if the Scottish Daily Express is the only media outlet with the gumption to point out what's going on then so be it.

SeethingHarpie · 11/04/2025 13:41

Are female inmates with mastectomies provided with medical/prosthetic bras? Are those who are incontinent or have their period are provided with incontinence or period pants? When the basics are provided for females in the female estate, then maybe TIMs getting “pretty women’s clothes” won’t seem to be in the realm of indulging trans privilege.

OP posts:
napody · 11/04/2025 17:07

SeethingHarpie · 11/04/2025 13:41

Are female inmates with mastectomies provided with medical/prosthetic bras? Are those who are incontinent or have their period are provided with incontinence or period pants? When the basics are provided for females in the female estate, then maybe TIMs getting “pretty women’s clothes” won’t seem to be in the realm of indulging trans privilege.

Are they not?! That's genuinely shocking, but I still think best addressed as a separate point.

@floisme I do see your point re ideology. I'm still not fully convinced- I worry it will get us into the realm of 'taxpayers money shouldnt be funding tvs etc etc'.

Hmm, I'm not sure. I do see what you're saying, I think it's more that this is at last something I can mentally file under 'live and let live' as far as trans ideology goes. They're not saying this makes transwomen women, just perhaps that it might cause distress to some to only be able to dress/present as masculine. I would be OK with a deluded prisoner who thought they were superman to be given a cape to wear from time to time too, to be honest!

AstoriaWaldorfSalad · 11/04/2025 17:17

Just remembering the M&S underwear reviews and then hearing about this "clothes dump" idea and really, really wishing I hadn't.

Justme56 · 11/04/2025 17:28

https://sex-matters.org/posts/case-law/green-v-secretary-of-state-for-justice/

There was a case where a prisoner went to court re GR discrimination about this, but lost as the comparator was male - they didn’t have a GRC. Seems they wanted a wide range of items not just clothes.

Green v Secretary of State for Justice - Sex Matters

2013 High Court

https://sex-matters.org/posts/case-law/green-v-secretary-of-state-for-justice/

Bosky · 11/04/2025 22:52

It is bad enough that these men are allowed to indulge their < redacted to avoid ban hammer > in prison if they buy their own clobber but to have taxpayers stump up for convicts to cos play as women is really taking the piss.

Some quotes from Grayson Perry to illuminate:

Perry rarely dresses up unless he’s going out, because it’s such an effort. Does he ever get bored with it? Now he tells me I don’t understand the nature of transvestism. “No, I’m not bored with transvestism. That would be silly – I’m a transvestite. The dress is only one element of the psycho-sexual process. Just because you don’t have a dress on doesn’t stop you being a tranny, in the same way as, if you’re not in bed with a man, it doesn’t stop you being gay.”

Does he still find it sexually exciting? “Oh yes,” he shouts excitedly. “Yeah!” But there is a problem, he says, with being a very public tranny. You mean, you couldn’t be seen at the Royal Academy in a nice frock and a stiffy? He nods enthusiastically. “You couldn’t do it. If I could manage it, I’m sure I’d be thinking how to do it. But I can’t.” He pauses. “My days of a spontaneous erection are long gone, anyway,” he adds a little sadly.

As a young man, he dressed as a more conventional woman. Why did Claire change her look? “I had a Damascene moment when I realised that the masquerade of dressing up as a woman and getting away with it, or ‘passing’, as they call it in the tranny world, was a fairly unrewarding experience. I used to come back from shopping in Oxford Street in my Monsoon outfit and think, well, nobody really gave me a second glance and that was boring.” He wanted to be noticed? “I was always slightly envious of those trannies who dressed more flamboyantly and didn’t give a shit.” But why, for instance, the Little Bo Peep look? “It’s a classic look. I used to call it the crack cocaine of femininity. It’s the furthest from the male macho look you could get. It’s vulnerable, it’s young, it’s humiliating. The fantasy of humiliation is a big drug for many men.”

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/04/grayson-perry-dress-tranny-art-who-are-you-tv

Cross-dressing got me when I was 12. I had a fantasy about being a prisoner in a German PoW camp and being ordered to dress as a woman. It gave me such a buzz that the next day I borrowed a dress from my sister.

I’m an unapologetic fetishist, which is a dirty word in other branches of the trans community. Once during filming I hung out with a bunch of trans people and I overheard one say: “He’s just a cross-dresser.” I turned round with my gun-turret head on and said: “Just a cross-dresser?” I got their number.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/13/grayson-perry-im-an-unapologetic-fetishist-

I was already a transvestite by the time I was 16. I took my stepmother’s clothes, changed in the toilets behind the Chelmsford Museum and walked up and down the high street in make-up, a mini dress and a wig. I was just acting on an instinctual desire, this need to play a role. It was very sexually exciting, a big turn on. Adrenaline is a great aphrodisiac. I got the wig from an advert in the back of the Daily Mail. It was about £1.50, a shapeless, brunette, very wiggy sort of thing. I’m sure the Daily Mail would be happy to know they facilitated my sexual fetish.

https://www.bigissue.com/culture/art/grayson-perry-daily-mail-facilitated-sexual-fetish/

He got his first thrill when he had to wear a tight, rubber smock for pottery classes at school and by the age of 12 Perry was wearing his mother’s dresses and his sister’s ballet outfit.

The sexual transgression from all the traditions of boyhood was what attracted him to female clothes.

“I have no special insight into being a woman and I would never claim that. I am just a bloke in a dress.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/grayson-perry-my-greatest-sort-of-sex-dream-was-to-be-a-housewif/

“Transvestites – I speak for my own community – are heavily invested in sexism,” he says. “You go to a transvestite gathering, you won’t see anybody in trousers. It’s a joke, you know: if one of the other transvestites regularly wears trousers, they go, ‘They’re going to have a sex change any minute.’ Because only real women wear trousers all the time.”

Perry thinks the transgender lobby “is a very vocal group. They punch above their weight. I do wonder why they are so angry.” Maybe because trans women almost always began as heterosexual men? Perry laughs. “Yes, so they have that entitlement. Yes, it could be.”

He argues all identity is “co-created: other people have to believe it. It is not enough for me to say, for example, ‘I am a black man,’ if no one agrees with me.” He tells me of a theory in psychotherapy – of which he has had a great deal – whereby a victim feels entitled because of their perceived oppression to become a persecutor. “And they enjoy the persecuting rather too much. Self-righteousness is an addictive drug,” he says. “People need to be weaned off.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grayson-perry-im-not-feminine-at-all-xn2dwtwxc

Grayson Perry: 'I’m an unapologetic fetishist'

The artist, 58, on art, road rage, teddy bears and his mum’s affair with the milkman

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/13/grayson-perry-im-an-unapologetic-fetishist-

OldCrone · 12/04/2025 08:19

napody · 11/04/2025 17:07

Are they not?! That's genuinely shocking, but I still think best addressed as a separate point.

@floisme I do see your point re ideology. I'm still not fully convinced- I worry it will get us into the realm of 'taxpayers money shouldnt be funding tvs etc etc'.

Hmm, I'm not sure. I do see what you're saying, I think it's more that this is at last something I can mentally file under 'live and let live' as far as trans ideology goes. They're not saying this makes transwomen women, just perhaps that it might cause distress to some to only be able to dress/present as masculine. I would be OK with a deluded prisoner who thought they were superman to be given a cape to wear from time to time too, to be honest!

They're not saying this makes transwomen women, just perhaps that it might cause distress to some to only be able to dress/present as masculine.

Please explain why I am supposed to care if a rapist feels distressed because he can't indulge his fetish in prison.

TheOtherRaven · 12/04/2025 09:55

Clothes are just clothes. Obviously all male prisoners have access to clothes, since there's no human rights issue of any walking around naked and shivering. Presumably they all arrive with the clothes they normally wear and have the same access to new clothes as needed. And in the women's estate, most likely the majority are wearing what could be termed gender neutral clothes anyway, the same as most women in Asda this morning. That's what most women wear day to day.

Providing costumes should not be a tax payer responsibility. And there's the normal gigantic elephant thundering around that for many men, the clothes are a sexual experience. Providing sex aids shouldn't be a tax payer responsibility. And the reality of the situation shouldn't be fogged over by the usual highly emotive view that whitewashes away all the inconvenient bits.

Considering tax payers are being told that they need to learn to give more and expect a lot less, that the country can't afford essential medical treatments for those in desperate need, that many disabled people are terrified that they're about to lose all income or rights when they can't work, that children with additional needs can't have essential help and support for an education, that the roads are in an appalling state and the country's dirty and full of uncollected rubbish, and all the rest of it?

Where should that money go first? On meeting real, immediate and serious unmet need? Or providing wholly unneccessary luxuries for criminal men for purposes of self expression?

ForestAtTheSea · 12/04/2025 15:18

Lovelysummerdays · 11/04/2025 07:55

Women wear their own clothes a lot of the time. You are supposed to turn up to sentencing with a bag of approved clothing from a list. Essentially joggers, shorts, pjs, T-shirts and jumpers. There was a thread on this recently because female prisoners have to handwash their own knickers and someone hadn’t packed so was doing her solo pair her every night. In the male estate they are laundered with everything else.

I remembered that topic; for women there is no wardrobe service. And this concept suggested in the article linked in the first post seems to cement the view (again) that clothes change the sex of the wearer.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/05/basic-lack-of-decency-driving-self-harm-in-womens-prisons-report-says

youkiddingme · 12/04/2025 21:43

How about we stop referring to skirts and dresses as 'women's clothing' in the first place. It's just clothing. It confers nothing.

Bosky · 12/04/2025 22:11

youkiddingme · 12/04/2025 21:43

How about we stop referring to skirts and dresses as 'women's clothing' in the first place. It's just clothing. It confers nothing.

It's obviously not "just clothing" to the men who want to wear skirts and dresses in prison.

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