It’s different. The fact that transmen are biologically female may mean their presence is less traumatic to female inmates. It’s my understanding that only a tiny fraction of transmen undergo a phalloplasty, and even those that do only do it for aesthetic reasons. Personally, I’m far more relaxed about letting transmen in women’s prisons. And if they want to serve their time in men’s prisons I’m ok that, too. Transmen don’t pose a threat to the safety and dignity of male prisoners in the same way transwomen do for female prisoners.
You follow this with a lot of rationalization, but I absolutely don’t think it’s different, except that we labor under patriarchal stereotypes about men and women and harbor deep-seated animosity as a culture toward transwomen in a way that we don’t always toward transmen.
Thousands of years of violent oppression have earned all women the right to assume that any biological male is a potential threat.
Several reasons:
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Let’s say that this non-violent transwoman is very masculine presenting. Women who’ve been sexually abused might be traumatised by the thought of having to shower with them.
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If you’re willing to let non-violent transwomen in, by what logic can you keep violent transwomen out? How violent is too violent?
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All we really know about the non-violent transwoman is that they’ve been imprisoned for a non-violent offence. That doesn’t mean they’re not violent.
I freely admit that as a man I am less qualified to comment, but I don’t think this is a healthy or helpful attitude for most women to adopt. I am very willing to be corrected on this point by any women present, though.
That seems easy to accommodate, it’s not as if the entire facility takes a shower at the same time.
Any violent prisoner needs to be managed to reduce or (ideally) eliminate the risk to other prisoners, their gender and sexual organs are irrelevant.
True, but again that applies to any prisoner regardless of gender or sexual organs.
I don’t quite agree. I think it’s true that our culture harbors more animosity towards transwomen than transmen. However, I also think that, in certain contexts of which prison is definitely one, our culture harbors more suspicion of biological males than of biological females, and - as much as it’s uncomfortable for me as a biological male to acknowledge this - I think that suspicion is highly justified and I think we need to work within the reality this creates for women.
I’ve seen no evidence that transwomen face less threat from cismen than ciswomen do. If you’re wanting to protect women from men, your unwillingness to protect transwomen suggests some other factor at play.
One aspect of this issue could be addressed similar to how it’s done in sports–standards for hormone levels. A trans woman wanting to go to a women’s prison would need to meet certain limits for hormones. They could mandate maximum levels of testosterone and minimum levels of estrogen. This should help reduce the level of typical male aggression. It would also reduce the number of criminals fraudulently saying they are women so they can go to women’s prisons. If they aren’t already on hormone therapy, they wouldn’t qualify.
I oppose any government mandate of this sort. I am a physician, I am there to treat the patient and serve their legitimate health needs, NOT to chemically control their behavior. No ethical physician should be doing such things without an overriding emergent clear and present need to help the patient. And that usually requires a court order, that such an intervention is merited. I’ve been in court often enough in my career requesting emergency orders to save patient health and lives, but NOT to control their behavior.
I had enough hassle in the past when my state legislature passed a law saying physicians could not maintain trans patients on their hormones/androgen blockers while they were incarcerated. I violated that law plenty, because it was in the patient’s best interests to continue them on those legal, legitimate meds. That law was eventually thrown out by the courts, fortunately.
As a woman I can only say that it may not be a"healthy" attitude, but it certainly is safer than otherwise.
It’s certainly safer. But in this case, that assumption is being used to justify placing transwomen in men’s prisons, in a way that may be exceedingly dangerous to them.
I agree with you and I’m a woman. That’s why I believe the root of TERF-Y ideology is misandry.
I question whether it is even appropriate to discuss such a topic absent a consideration of real-world factual circumstances, based on supposition and stereotypes, and so divorced from reality. To be clear, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to limit discussion to a single specific case, but (1) you certainly made reference to a single specific case in your OP as providing an impetus for discussion (so it seemed appropriate to me to inquire), and (2) even where the discussion may be of the topic in general, specific cases (and their relevant factual circumstances) could be illuminating.
One of the downsides to being in prison is you don’t get a lot of choice about who you associate with.
I 100% agree. There is no excuse for a prisoner to get raped in prison, ever. Man, woman, or any other gender. I once fell down a rabbit hole on this subject because of a novel I’m working on, and the abuses that are allowed to go on in the US prison system are appalling. Men and women are victimized all the time. It’s not acceptable. Prisons have an obligation to create a system where all prisoners are safe. Period. It has nothing to do with some person’s genitalia.
Paging @Little_Nemo.
ISTM all of the current social ructions about trans-folks comes down to how much social and logistical accommodation to make to ever less common subgroups of our populace.
Segregating e.g. group-use bathrooms into “male” and “female” has been standard for a century or more. Do we now need 4 kinds, 8 kinds, or 23 kinds? Or do we simple eliminate all group bathrooms and replace it all with totally individual accommodations? And if so, on what timeline at whose expense? Or is the whole thing silly, just another freakout of the political classes, as after all, all these sorts of humans have existed since forever. Trans- and the rest of the alphabet soup may have gained political currency mostly in recent years, but the underlying behavioral biology dates back millennia. If it’s always been problematic for the differently-sexualised/gendered that’s a problem. Is here and now the place those problems should be addressed? Must be addressed?
When we get to prison, we have all the hot-house issues compressed into a very small space. Which makes it one of the worst examples from which to decide a strategic policy for a country.
Hard questions all, and my personal sympathies lie with the various folks whose minority concerns have been first ignored for decades to millennia, then rather suddenly whipped into a white heat brand of political football.
One thing about these kinds of discussions is that there’s the philosophical discussion and the practical discussion. Philosophically we may decide that it’s okay here on the SDMB, but practically it may be impossible to enact. American society isn’t even sympathetic to the basic safety of prisoners. They aren’t likely to be sympathetic to trans desires of prisoners if they don’t even care about keeping prisoners safe in general. The punishment is the purpose. The more the prisoner suffers, the better. Any practical solution in America would need to be one which Americans would support, which drastically limits the scope and feasibility of solutions. Perhaps a country with progressive ideals about incarceration (like Norway) would allow simple self-identification for gender in prisons, but I can’t see that working in a country like America. If America is to have policies for trans gender prison assignment, then there would need to be clear and objective standards for who would qualify. I don’t see that simple self-identification would be sufficient. I feel it would have to be something more like someone who has undergone significant medical transitioning and clearly conforms to society’s expectation of that gender. With that level of transgender transitioning, I can see America supporting it and many of the trans gender issues of the prisoners to be minimized. If the trans women in women’s prison have medically transitioned, there won’t be many legitimate objections that can be made. But if the trans women in women’s prisons have not medically transitioned and look like big, burly, muscular men, then there will be lots of objections and likely total trans gender prohibitions will be enacted.
I disagree. At it’s core, it’s about misogyny.
Which is true, and instructive about the over all nature of the complaint here.
The issue isn’t keeping women in prison safe. If that were the issue, we wouldn’t be talking about trans women, who are statistically insignificant when it comes to perpetrating sexual assaults.
The issue is making trans people suffer. That’s the motive driving this whole debate, and if the law changed tomorrow definitively barring trans women from women’s prisons, 95% of the people who are so concerned right now with the safety of women in prison are going to completely shut up about the issue.
I disagree. It’s true that transwomen face an elevated level of threat from cismen because of their trans status. I don’t know whether it’s equal to or greater than the threat women face but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was. And there’s certainly no doubt that transwomen are at an elevated level of risk in male prisons.
But as I said to Dead Cat, there are lots of different types of prisoners who face levels of risk in a male prison equal to or greater than the level of risk faced by transwomen. Snitches, pedophiles, ex-cops, effeminate gay men, and certain gang members would all face elevated levels of risk in a male prison. If the reason for housing transwomen in women’s prisons is that they’re at higher risk of being assaulted or worse, and if the level of risk faced by members of the other aforementioned at-risk groups is on par with or greater than the level of risk faced by transwomen, why should they not also be eligible to serve their sentence in a women’s prison?
Now, you might well say that it’s because transwomen are women and the others aren’t. But at this point we would’ve moved away from the safety argument. In response to arguments based on gender identity I’d say that, regardless of whether or not you think transwomen are women, prison is one of those areas where biological sex matters much more than gender. As I’ve previously stated, women have a right to be wary of biological males. In fact, I’d go further and say that a healthy suspicion of biological males is all but guaranteed to increase any woman’s life expectancy in any situation where they’re likely to encounter them. If you haven’t already, I’d very strongly recommend reading ‘The Gift of Fear’ by Gavin De Becker, as it makes this exact point far more persuasively than I ever could.
To me, the solution is obvious. House transwomen prisoners in male prisons, but in protective custody. That way they’d be protected like any other high risk prisoner, and women prisons can remain single sex.
That sounds like an argument for not moving transwomen into women’s prisons.