California prisons have hundreds of transgender inmates requesting new housing | Hacker News Reader

California prisons have hundreds of transgender inmates requesting new housing

latimes.com

29 pointsnailer27 comments

All of the focus appears to be on men who are now women. I wonder how many women who have become men are anxious to be in a male prison?

I think the article says: "Of the 261 requests, all but six asked to be housed at a women’s facility."

Why do a higher percentage of California prisoners identify as trans, than do non-criminal Californians?

Is there a known connection between transgenderism and higher crime rates?

> Is there a known connection between transgenderism and higher crime rates?

No, but there is a known connection between being transgender and resorting to prostitution to survive.

Which, unfortunately, is illegal in California.

How do you know the connection between transgenderism and prostitution is based on survival?

I've read quite a bit about transgenderism as a requirement for my degree, and nothing about them renders them incapable of holding down legal jobs. In fact, they have significant legal protections.

Unless you're saying it's because they have to miss so much work because of surgeries, treatments, appointments, dilation breaks, etc? And they resort to hooking because of the flexible schedule?

For context, it looks like about 5% of California's prison population is female (by sex) [0], and there are something like 2-4x as many trans women as trans men [1] in the population as a whole. So that discrepancy is probably pretty consistent with the relative prevalence of trans men and trans women in the prison population, meaning that trans men and trans women in prison are probably about equally likely to request a transfer.

[0] https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-prison-populati...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286423757_The_Demog...

>I wonder how many women who have become men are anxious to be in a male prison? reply

I'm guessing very near zero for obvious reasons. /s?

(non-paywall version) https://web.archive.org/web/20210408162031/https://www.latim...

There is no reason for prisons to be segregated by gender identity.

Either they should be mixed or they should be segregated based on biological sex.

>no reason

You’re stating a conclusion here, but you’re skipping the argument. People who disagree with you have perfectly valid concerns. Your conclusion might be correct (for the sake of argument) but you provided 0 support for your conclusion. So I think your comment is content-free, or at the very least contributes 0 to the conversation.

It's hard to begin an argument with the position of there is no reason to do something. The only way to do it would be erect a straw man, then tear it down.

Then, how about this. I understand the view of no segregation at all. That's just one big group, no additional work of separation. But how separation by biological sex more meaningful than separation by gender identity?

I'm not sure what the main reasons for segregating by bio sex were, but I can think of a few and none apply to gender identity.

Maybe the most important is you don't want prisoners getting pregnant.

Men in prison are also massively stronger and build shanks out of everything. If you do have a fight break out, hopefully its segregated by sex, otherwise the woman has no chance in the supermajority case.

Trans women are subjected to sexual violence from men in the same way that cis women are. They need to be protected from male violence.

All women in prison are at risk of sexual violence. That comes from other prisoners (including cis women), and from officers.

Focussing attention on the small number of trans prisoners, and ignoring the risk from cis prisoners and from staff, means that women will continue to be at risk of sexual violence.

> Trans women are subjected to sexual violence from men in the same way that cis women are.

Yes but females are also subjected to sexual violence from males.

Transitioned I can understand, but the article specifies "regardless of anatomy", which seems like too loose a criteria for potentially violent inmates, group showering, etc.

If someone has transitioned they are transsexual. Transsexuals have had legal rights for decades. The recent transgender rights movement is specifically about people who have not transitioned.

Gee I'm sure there no unscrupulous convicts who will pretend to be women to be around women

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

Per TFA:

"A transgender woman at a men’s prison, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said that she knows at least five inmates who have applied to transfer under false pretenses and that staffers have asked her to help identify such inmates." <subsequent paragraphs address the issue in greater detail>

Downvoted because we know there are unscrupulous people involved in this process already (we are, after all, talking about prison inmates) and only functions as a way to ignore the legitimate question of what should be done with legitimately trans inmates.

Why does being concerned with male violence only function as a way to ignore trans inmates?

This doesn’t really make sense to me. Sex segregated prisons exist to stop sexual violence but the majority of trans women are attracted to women, and they can easily overpower cis women. I would expect cis women to be more in danger from lesbian trans women than trans women are in danger from men. The gender segregation isn’t for identity reasons!

Not just sexual violence, but sec in general. It's more of a punishment to be locked up and not having sex than if you were free to have sex (even homosexual activity is not allowed in prisons). I think another reason for the gender segregation is to prevent pregnancies.

> the majority of trans women are attracted to women

Do you have a source for that?

Wikipedia says 60%

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_sexuality

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