Readers Note:
There is an archive version of the link to Allsopp's Bang to Rights below.
https://archive.ph/Lpi4w#selection-463.0-527.352
This is a critique of the validity of that article. It is not a reliable 'debunking' of the UK prisoner statistics where male people with transgender identities are shown to not have the same level of committing sex offences as female people or less than female people in the UK prison.
My observations are in brackets.
From Allsop
This is a fundamentally malicious and bogus argument:
it is fearmongering and smearing the innocent majority of a group based on the crimes of a handful of its members; a propaganda technique applied to marginalised groups throughout history;
(Official and neutral statistics that show a trend is a legitimate discussion point, considering we are and have been discussing safeguarding principles. This is not propaganda, this is showing an understanding of how risk has been based on historic and current facts.)
From Allsop
it has no credible moral, ethical or legal basis; human rights aren’t dependent on the crime stats for a minority group, just as they aren’t dependent on whether you live in a ‘high-crime postcode’; the vast majority are law-abiding even from the worst possible angle on the data;
(This is not relevant as far as I can see for invalidating official prison statistics. The issue is whether a group of male people still commit a particular group of crimes at the same rate or more or less than the general male population of the UK)
From Allsop
some of the rights they want to remove (legal gender recognition under the Gender Recognition Act 2004) are unrelated to crime, safety or gendered spaces;
(This is not relevant as far as I can see for invalidating official prison statistics. The issue is whether a group of male people still commit a particular group of crimes at the same rate or more or less than the general male population of the UK)
From Allsop
it is a classic “won’t somebody think of the women and children?!” moral panic, often using arguments like “even one case is too many, can’t be too careful!” which are deployed highly selectively to deny rights only to the minority group, not to everyone else;
(It is about safeguarding. Remembering that access to single sex spaces is not just about protection from sex crimes, but also a range of other specific needs unique to female people.
It is also very important here to remember this whenever some one tries to leverage in 'deny rights' - Article 8 has restrictions available to it.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-rights-act/article-8-respect-your-private-and-family-life
Article 8 protects your right to respect for your private and family life.
The EHRC link covers what this means. Including these restrictions:
Restrictions to the right to respect for your private and family life
There are situations when public authorities can interfere with your right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. This is only allowed where the authority can show that its action is lawful, necessary and proportionate in order to:
protect national security
protect public safety
protect the economy
protect health or morals
prevent disorder or crime, or
protect the rights and freedoms of other people.
Action is ‘proportionate’ when it is appropriate and no more than necessary to address the problem concerned.)
From Allsop
in many cases the statistics they use are irrelevant, selective, biased, decontextualised, misinterpreted and presented deceptively;
(These prison stats are not irrelevant, selective, biased, there is no decontextualisation, they are not misinterpreted and stating the raw stats is not presenting them deceptively. They are accurately collected and have been reinforced by being accepted as accurate in parliament and in court (ie. no judge has said, 'these statistics are inaccurate'. They have accepted them as being accurate. So, Allsop just saying this, doesn't mean any of this point is true or an accurate characterisation of the MoJ prison stats)
From Allsop
these often aren’t even actually crimestats — they are imprisonment stats, which is not the same thing at all when you are trying to claim that a group is “inherently” more criminal; the connection between crime and punishment is tenuous and complex…
(This doesn't even make logical sense. The only point any one using these statistics should be making is that they don't show in any way that this group of male people show a female pattern of crime - either in rates or in the nature of the crime itself).
From Allsop
…and marginalised groups often have much higher rates of incarceration due to systemic bias in every stage of the justice system, and wider society; one cannot take such numbers at face value without adopting (e.g.) blatantly racist beliefs. Prison stats can (and do) vary dramatically (e.g. due to changes in policing), demolishing the idea that they measure “inherent” qualities of a group.
(And this is where we keep pointing out that this is a flawed 'theory'. What does seem to be a logical deduction looking at past cases that in the UK, and Australia, this group get leniency. Quite the opposite of this point. There is no evidence in the UK to suggest that the UK justice system has a systemic bias towards this group of male people. At all. )