About RMW:
I felt very uneasy about the comparison between social workers assessing whether or not to remove children from their possibly dangerous but loved families,
and prisons assessing whether or not a male prisoner who identifies as a woman should be put with the women prisoners he identifies with.
In the case of children there is likely to be an already crucial bond with their family which may be a necessary part of the child’s well being and worth an element of risk. But there is no such bond to protect in the prison context meaning the that the women prisoners ( the child as it were) need that man.
In any case, maybe social workers are more careful than prisoner assessors.
Social workers are thinking of the child ( the women as it were). Prisoner assessors may well, according to some information ( but nothing is transparent so we can’t be sure), be thinking more of the needs of the male prisoner ( the possibly harmful family as it were) than the women ( the child).
Though I can see RMW was trying to make clear that a likelihood, or not, of harm is weighed in the balance all the time in order to assess various outcomes, I think using children in this context was not truly comparable. And, because it was emotive, and related to children, it was a psychological way to close down any argument.
Similarly the apartheid argument is troubling.
Logic and philosophy elude me and I realise there are very clever people here who may see the argument better, but I cannot understand the ‘racist’ or ‘apartheid’ argument.
Firstly the balance of power in apartheid was black people powerless/white people ruling. So here it would be women prisoners are powerless and are being told by a more powerful and stronger class to move over and let one of the powerful relatively oppressive class into their midst.
To make out a transwoman would be a powerless equivalent, RMW gave the hypothetical instance of a transwoman who has had surgery, and hormones for years. But in real life there is no law to say such a woman must have had surgery, or even that they can be checked to see probably. I am also pretty sure the ECHR advised that requiring surgery would be against a person’s human rights. (This came up originally at the time GRCs were introduced, I think.)
Another related point is that the Swedish study carried over 30 yrs of males, which was of males who had had transgender surgery, found they still had the same offending rates for violent crime as ordinary men, (though there was no survey specifically about rape). So even RMW’s hypothetical example would not necessarily translate, in real life, as a gentle, unthreatening person.
Secondly, just to be literal about segregated spaces involving the idea of race, in African countries where the majority of people are black, they do not, I feel sure, think it is apartheid or racist to separate men from women in certain contexts. They must have lavatories and schools for example where only girls and women are allowed regardless of whether they are black or white girls.
RMW tried to make out that an additional prison space for the safety and dignity of transgender males would be separating them off from society and ‘we know where that leads’. That ominous short sentence seemed to suggest a ghetto with possible death to follow, even though he did not actually say that. I personally cannot see that a third space would be anything so dire but, rather, much nicer and safer than men’s prisons while at the same time not interfering with women’s dignity and safety.