This analogy is so, so illogical and weak.
We have mountains upon mountains of evidence that the restriction of fundamental civil liberties is bad, that it reduces, in a thousand ways, our quality of life.
Being allowed to “identify” as a sex different from your actual sex isn’t a civil liberty. There is no good analogy to any other right. No one has a civil right to go to the prison of their choice.
All analogies in defense of this thing are similarly illogical and weak. There is no serious political movement pushing for the right to racial identity affirmation, nationality identity affirmation, religious identity affirmation, or fat identity affirmation. The only kind of affirmation we’re being told we’re entitled to is “gender identity”. And we’re not being told why this should be elevated over all the other social constructs. We’re just being told it’s a right.
Speaking of the last kind of identity I rattled off, I just watched a documentary on Amazon Prime called “The Dark Side of Fat Acceptance”. It is low budget and not going to win any academy awards. But when you watch it, you see that crazies have infiltrated the fat acceptance movement. The same kind of crazies that have infiltrated the trans movement. If you say any negative thing about obesity, these crazies will come for you and “cancel” you. Even if you’re fat yourself. Even if you believe in body positivity. Crazies don’t want negotiation. They don’t want an intellectual debate. They just want everyone to repeat slogans (“Health at any size”) and echo whatever is echoing in the echo chamber. Without the internet, these people wouldn’t have any power. They’d just be weirdos living sad marginal lives, not influencing anyone and definitely not setting the terms of the discourse.
The thing is, we can all recognize delusional fat people. People need to appreciate that there are indeed delusional “gender identity” people. It should not be a crime against humanity to tell these people to STFU and go sit down somewhere when they start getting carried away.
@AHunter3, thanks for not being one of these people.
What I keep coming back to is this:
We are allowed to be skeptical for literally everything imaginable. Everything, that is, except, gender identity.
Ask anyone in jail whether they are guilty and they all will say no. They all identify as innocent. And this means nothing to our opinion as to whether they actually are guilty. We know a convict has every single incentive to lie about being guilty. Only their conscience stands in the way. We don’t let ourselves get taken in by self-serving lies unless we’re talking about gender identity.
A law that allows convicts to self-identify as women and be treated as such is about as intellectually sound as a law allowing convicts to self-identify as innocent and be treated as such. There are absolutely zero downsides for a man to make this claim. The only thing standing in the way is a man’s conscience—which is likely to be severely underdeveloped in most criminals.
People in here are stupidly defending this stupidity because they can’t admit they’ve allowed themselves to be played. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. Led astray.I can kind of sympathize with this. Victims of Ponzi schemes do the same thing. But it’s still hard to watch.
One thing to keep in mind about prisons is that they have to manage violent risk all the times. There are prisoners who would never hurt a fly and prisoners who think nothing of beating someone to a pulp. That’s true regardless of any gender difference between prisons. Women’s prisons may house women who are extremely violent and dangerous and would be a threat to other women. A transwoman, or man, in a women’s prison won’t automatically be treated as a low-level prisoner and put in general population. A transwomen will likely be housed according to her risk level, and that might be in the pod with very violent women if the risk level was appropriate. The structure of prison means that just claiming to be a woman doesn’t automatically grant lots of freedoms. That’s different from things like bathrooms and locker rooms since there is no oversight. In public, anyone can claim a woman card and waltz into a public restroom or locker room with no oversight or segregation based on risk level. So certainly there are issues housing transwomen in a women’s prison, but it’s not necessarily like the transwoman is going to an all-women’s resort where she can have total freedom.
We will have to see what happens, @YWTF. Trans advocates better hope a whole bunch of male prisoners don’t start filing petitions and being transferred, because the pushback will be real and support for trans rights will deteriorate as a result. All it will take for significant pushback is for an investigative reporter to bring attention to a women’s prison on the brink of turning into a sausage fest. I don’t think the prison system wants that. I don’t think TRAs really want that. I don’t even think the ACLU will want that. So I am thinking that there will be some some self-policing involved. Not enough to protect individual women from harm, perhaps, but enough to prevent the whole thing from being characterized as an embarrassing joke on the state of California.
At least one good thing will come out of this: Other states can watch what happens in California and learn what to do and not to do. If the women’s prisons do get overrun with males, other states will be able to justify why they should take a harder stance.
There tends to be very few violent inmates in women’s prisons, so the amount of security needed to keep the population under control is significantly less than in a men’s prison.
If we see a lot of transwomen in women’s prisons, it is unlikely there will be sufficient space to house them if the plan is to simply put them where violent women are housed.
If they are segregated from gen-pop, I could see that leading to lawsuits. I could see a lawyer arguing this is unfair treatment on the basis of gender identity. “A woman with a penis shouldn’t be treated any differently than a woman with a vagina, your Honor!”
I hope the 4th estate is willing to cover these concerns. If the current climate remains like it has been, they won’t.
There does seem to be signs the climate is changing, though.
I’m not reassured by the safeguards included. The prison service is forbidden to deny a housing preference due to a factor present among other people incarcerated at the preferred type of facility, as well as due to anatomy or sexual orientation. California already housed Sherri, formerly Richard, Masbruch, who brutally raped and tortured two women, in a women’s prison, so how bad would a criminal have to be to get rejected?
There’s also a man’s machismo. Most men in jail probably don’t even want to be housed with women, although they may well sign up to get the other benefit in the act: it enables transgender prisoners to ask for a single cell or cellmate of their choice, which sounds like a huge privilege in jail. The problem is that guys who are willing to pretend to be trans are probably exactly the ones you most need to bar from a women’s prison.
Male machismo is a weird thing. A guy can get macho points by just being shameless in his attempt to game the system.
This probably explains why 1 in 10 Irish Traveller men in UK prisons claims to be transgender - gaming the system is pretty much part of their culture - but they aren’t all clamouring to live in women’s jails. Honestly, I think a lot of men would find it boring. What do the guys in here think?
I’m not worried about an avalanche of men self-IDing into women’s jails, I’m worried the few who do will be predators of one kind or another.
Found this article from a Marxist about how ‘woke’ ideas have taken over the establishment:
It is time that society catches up and realises that wokeism is not the movement for the disadvantaged and oppressed. Wokeism is the establishment. It is inextricably linked to corporate politics and capitalism. Woke activists have disproportionate social power in today’s fraught world. They are the establishment in the culture wars.
Worth looking at just for the ‘Wokeopoly’ game.
I agree that this makes sense from a strategic point of view, but I think most trans women would have a problem with that, since the point seems to be to try and blend in with the part of the population that identifies as women, not to be separated from it.
Lots of truth in that article. Hit on all the points I would’ve hit on if I had written it.
I suspect a lot of the problem I have with the current trans movement is due to its adoption of ideas from post-modernism. Isn’t Judith Butler into that sort of thing?
The most important point is to keep them safe in prison, surely? Why is trans women’s desire to blend in more important than cis women’s safety and well being?
Damn. That writer brought it hard. But I can’t argue against anything they said, even though it also applies to black activism to a certain degree.
The very last paragraph rings very true:
Wokeism is performance. It is mostly educated, establishment youths LARPing the struggles of truly marginalised groups.
It is easy to shout TERF at someone on the internet. Anyone can do it. Genuine supporters who are passionate about both trans folks and women’s rights can do it. But so can the misogynists who are sick of Karens having the audacity to act like people. I see good people turning off their brain cells because they don’t want to consider the possibility that not all the people screaming TERF are righteous or even on the same ideological side. They just hear all the screaming and assume that it’s completely reasonable and rational. Someone said JKR is spouting lies and mistruths, well, that must be what she’s doing. We don’t have time to think for ourselves. We’ll just take someone’s word for it and trust they know what they are talking about. And we’ll join the chorus of screamers because screaming is not only fun, but it’s a way to signal our virtue.
This isn’t limited to trans issues either. It’s everything nowadays. I know I’m not the only one who is way too busy to read every news story I see. Sometimes I’ll just read the headline and scroll down to the comments and try to glean what the story is about from the commentary…trusting that the commentary isn’t distorting the what, when, and why. Which is a stupid thing to do, of course, but that’s how things work in 2020. I want to be informed, but I don’t want to do any work. I just want somebody to tell me what I should be outraged about and not bore me with a bunch of facts.
Because it’s all about acceptance of trans women as women. Ideally, no one would even know. I’m not saying I agree with it, but I’m pretty sure that NOT being part of the general population of ciswomen is not a part of the trans agenda. It’s all about inclusion, which essentially means special privileges while pretending there are no special privileges.
I think in both cases the cause is good, but it’s got caught up with some very bad ideas, spread by very loud and influential people. And I can’t decide if I’m more afraid that the people with the bad ideas might win, or that there’ll be a backlash against them and it’ll set back those causes hugely.
The California law gives trans people rights no one else has: the right to choose whether to serve their sentence in a men’s or women’s jail, and to “have their perception of health and safety given serious consideration in any bed assignment, placement, or programming decision within the facility in which they are housed pursuant to paragraph (3) of subdivision (a) or subdivision (b), including, but not limited to, granting single-cell status, housing the individual with another incarcerated person of their choice, or removing the individual or individuals who pose a threat from any location where they may have access to the individual who has expressed a safety concern.” So yeah, special privileges.
All women are equal! But some are more equal than others.