Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
Your sex is private information under GDPR. Why would the GDPR be stricter than than HIPAA in this case?
>Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
"But what about the children?" is never a good argument for taking the away the rights of others.
Assuming the former right does exist, then there is a conflict of rights (between the wishes of males who want to be housed with females, and females who want to be housed without males). Rights conflicts like this are not solved by simply telling one group (in this case, women) to shut up and stop complaining.
Where the ACLU comes in here I have no idea.
People typically consider that women (cis or trans) have a right to be housed together, and separately from cismen.
If anything, the biggest problem of policy are trans-men, who would likely feel much more concerned by being housed with cis-man prisoners, but who would also make women uncomfortable.
I'm pretty sure that's how conflicts with women have been historically resolved.
We segregate prisons by sex. Primary and secondary sex characteristics are observable characteristics that indicate one's sex.
Your argument is like saying "You don't buy a Mazda. You go to the Mazda dealership and buy a car that says Mazda on the back, interior, and on the manual. You don't actually know the car is a Mazda."
>"But what about the children?" is never a good argument for taking the away the rights of others.
I also hope that you don't point to school shootings to argue against the second amendment then.
On the other hand, it is well known that transwomen are much more often the victims of rape by cismen, if living in men's prisons.
If anything, I would think the biggest problem here is the fate of transmen. I doubt a ciswoman would feel very comfortable sharing a cell with a transman, but a transman also has much higher chances of being abused if sharing a cell with a cisman.
There is no proof males who identify as trans (transwomen) are any less likely to commit rape than males who do not identify as trans. The rape risk of being housed with a male is real regardless of how the male identifies with regards to gender. If you have data to the contrary (data indicating that trans identifying males are less likely to commit rape than other males) please share.
To be clear: not accusing either of those above of being an actual rapist! Just asking which would be more likely to inspire this fear in someone who doesn't know them.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ContraPoints#/media/File%3AN...
Are you just making this up, or do you have some statistics on female on female rape?
Here's an analysis of data from the Ministry of Justice in the UK, demonstrating that trans-identifying males have similar patterns of criminality to other males, including sexual assault: https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-se...
Really? Are there actual women who are genuinely concerned about this or is this a strawman invented by other people? You see this same issue with transwomen in sports. There is massive concern-trolling for women "who want a level playing field", but when you actually _ask_ women who compete with them (like in the case of Lia Thomas), they don't have a problem with it.
You are masking your transphobia in coddling for women who aren't even complaining about these issues. Women in prison are far more likely to be raped by law enforcement; but somehow the 3 or so transwomen who might sleep in the same cell as a woman is a bigger mark for the ACLU.
>I also hope that you don't point to school shootings to argue against the second amendment then.
That's actually pretty simple for me, I don't think gun rights are inalienable rights, no more than I think I have a right to own a playstation.
Keeping penises out of the same room with vaginas will not magically eliminate sexual assault because sexual assault is based on power and willingness to harm another, not whether not tab A physically fits into slot B.
If you think keeping penises away from vaginas will eliminate prison rape then clearly you don't know much about rape in mens' prisons.
Indeed, in trans circles, expecting the latter as a required factor is often considered highly offensive. This, and the notion that a person needs to experience gender dysphoria to be trans, is now derisively known as the 'truscum' point of view.
Non-binary people are another discussion, and how they should fit into male/female spaces is of course unclear.
Overall, I would agree that prison assignment should depend on more than reported identity. Especially since it is conceivable that people in prison are likelier to lie about their internal identity if they believe they can get something out of this lie. This is much less relevant for lower risk environments, such as bathrooms (in my country at least, unisex bathrooms are anyway quite common) or gym lockers.
The actual problem is that prisons are unsafe for everyone and there's little done to make them safer. But they'd rather use transgender people in their culture war because they don't care about the actual violence problems.
Once prison is organized like a summer camp with a 2:1 guard to prisoner ratio, we can do them co-ed.
In any event, I still don't see how any of this justifies keeping this whole topic in the shadows and making public discourse impossible by keeping the scope of the question secret from the public.
* I'm taking your word for this, haven't looked it up.
The goal (I assume! You haven't spelled this out.) is to reduce the rate of sexual assault between cellmates in prison.
The system has to determine who can end up in the same cell. Prison wardens have access to some data about prisoners. The question is which data is used to partition prisoners.
Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault.
My point is that that claim requires some level of supporting evidence since the widespread accounts of prison rape in same-sex prisons implies that simply avoiding penises and vaginas in the same cell does not appear to be sufficient to lower the chances of rape.
Implicit in your comment is only looking at this from the perspective of the woman in the cell who doesn't have a penis. But the other cellmate has to end up somewhere and the overall goal should be to reduce the rate of sexual assault for all prisoners, not just cis ones.
So, if you don't allow trans women into women's cells, where do you put them? And do you really think putting a trans woman in a cell with a male prisoner is going to lead to a lower incidence of assault?
If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all?
It sounds like you're arguing for mixed sex prisons, even within individual cells.
Or age segregation. Just because a 50 year old man has a penis and is 3x the weight of a 13 year old girl doesn't mean that they shouldn't be locked in a cell together. That's just your bigoted assumption that he's a violent person, you don't even know him.
But that's not the actual choice prisons have to make. The choice they have to make is "which cell does the trans woman go into"? Given that there likely aren't enough trans women prisoners to put them only with other trans women, the choice is "with a cis man or with a cis woman." And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman.
I could be wrong. But given what I've read about trans women being the target of sexual assault outside of prison and sexual assault among males in male prisons, I think it's a fairly safe bet.
I guess the question hinges on whether you imagine a trans woman to be more "like a man" (stereotypically stronger, aggressive, and more prone to perpetrate assault) or "like a woman" (stereotypically weaker, passive, and more prone to being the victim of assault). What I know about trans women suggests the latter more than the former.
Obviously, individual behavior trumps all. Any particular woman (trans or not) who has a history of violence or sexual assault towards women should not be housed with another woman. The same should be true for men (again, trans or not).
The name of the game should be keeping perpetrators away from victims, and my belief is that "has a penis while other has a vagina" is a relatively poor proxy for that. Yes, there is a strong correlation, but that's a Simpson's paradox from combining the much smaller trans population with the very large cis population. If you were to separate out the datasets and consider cis men and women separately from trans men and women, I suspect you would see no or the opposite correlation.
Why do you believe this?
And, more importantly, why is it somehow the responsibility of women to be used as a mitigation for male on male violence?
If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue. So why should incarcerating the trans-identifying male amongst women be the solution?
No, if a prisoner attacks a prisoner with whom they were placed, due to reasons which are reasonably foreseeable and preventable, it's a prison system issue, not an issue for the gender class of the attacker or victim, whether they are the same or different, irrespective of the basis in which gender is ascribed.
Even moreso than with restrooms, it's very clear that gender segregation, whether based on ascribed gender at birth or gender identity, is not even approximately an effective protection against predatory behavior [*], so the safety issue:
(1) Isn't a good defense for any model of gender segregation, and
(2) Needs addressed by mechanisms other than gender segregation (one of the more effective of which is probably imprisoning fewer people, at lower levels of crowding), which, surprisingly, pretty much no one that is using the danger to argue for their preferred model of gender segregation even pretends to be concerned about.
[*] Edit: and this is particularly true for women in our segregated system who face twice the incidence of inmate-on-inmate assault, as well as higher rates of staff-on-inmate assault, and far less social attention to the problem of such assaults. If anything, it's more defensible based on outcomes to say our system of segregation exists to protect sexual assault against women prisoners than to say it exists to protect against sexual assault for anyone.
An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex. This is in addition to other policies regarding the prison environment.
If you want to undo that policy of sex segregation, you should have a very good reason, and proof that it won't cause harm to the sex who, in general, have lesser physical strength and can be impregnated by the other.
No, it hasn't.
That's an after the fact rationalization for preserving the policy invented long after segregation on fairly explicitly misogynistic grounds was established, when the original motivation was no longer something people felt comfortable saying overtly in government.
Preventing assaults (and sexual assaults specifically) in prisons is not a major motivator for the structure of our prison system; if it was, there'd be a lot fewer sexual assaults in it.
It doesn't matter that the segregation was originally pushed for with the benefit of male prisoners in mind. If you look at the conditions for women in prison before and after sex segregation, it was an improvement.
We shouldn't be regressing back and allowing men to be incarcerated alongside women again, unless there is a provably good reason for this - which, so far, no-one has demonstrated.
Why do you believe this?
Anyway, I believe women have a right to dignity and privacy and to set some boundaries against males in refuges & places they are especially vulnerable. Female prisoners should absolutely be allowed to refuse to share sleeping quarters with males. Frankly think it's nuts that this should be considered a controversial stance.
Regarding the supposed issue of safety of trans identifying male prisoners in male prisons (I haven't seen data around this but let's assume it's an issue), it's still not clear the answer is housing with women. If a gay man is more likely to be abused in a male prison, or a small or young man, does that mean men with any of these characteristics should be put in women's prison to improve their safety conditions? This doesn't scan.
Its notable to me that as concerned as you are about prisoner safety, I don't see you or other advocates of males in womens prisons mention the safety of the female prisoners should men be added to their cells. Does their safety not rate?
Strange that despite the much higher rates of sexual assault (inmate on inmate and staff on inmate) for women in the sex segregated prison system we have, the only time safety of women prisoners gets brought up is as an argument for preserving sex segregation against the fairly minor tweak of gender-identity segregation and not about trying to figure out why a system adopted specifically to isolate and impose harsher punishment on women because they were viewed as incapable of rehabilitation once they had fallen into crime continues, despite recent retcons of it's supposed justification, to disproportionately sexual victimize women.
I believe everyone has a right to dignity and privacy and the right to set some boundaries against others in refuges and places where they are especially vulnerable.
What I don't understand is people that thinks that this right disappears just because the “other“ is of the same gender (whether that's gender socially ascribed at birth, or gender identity really is a side issue.)
https://reduxx.info/transgender-inmate-convicted-of-raping-f...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/transgender-...
https://www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-felon-who-killed-m...
In summary: women in prison are being raped and sexually assaulted by trans-identifying males, who should never have been locked up in women's prisons in the first place.
It really is well beyond time for authorities to reverse these ridiculous policies that elevate claims of gender identity above all other concerns, and return to segregating prisons by sex like we had previously.
Those three articles are a drop in the bucket.
Consider that there are N trans women convicts and you're trying to decide where to house them. The relevent number is not "how many women do they rape if you house them with other women"? It's "What is the relative difference in rape stasticics between housing them with men versus women?"
Obviously, any number of sexual assaults is unacceptable. But if housing trans women with men leads to thousands of rapes while housing them with women leads to only dozens, it's still a better policy. The only reason you could argue against that is if you consider a trans woman being a victim somehow more acceptable than a cis woman being victimized.
So then the argument is just around the question, should women and men be housed in the same prisons, without any sex segregation? And we already know the answer to that.
Historically, mostly patriarchal misogyny; specifically, the belief that while women were inherently more virtuous, those who had “fallen” a state subject to imprisonment had fallen further, and less correctibly than men, and that they were a corrupting influence that would impair the rehabilitation of imprisoned men (that's also why imprisoned women, originally segregated within prisons rather than in separate prisons, were often given fewer meals, not encouraged to socialize, and otherwise treated worse than male prisoners.)
More recently, in order to avoid reexamining the actual policy of segregation, societies have tried to retcon a more modern rationalization, but that rationalization is not actually the reason for the policy, just an excuse for it.
In particular, influential British prison reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, promoted sex segregation as a means to prevent the sexual exploitation of women prisoners. They also pushed for many other reforms to make prisons safer and more rehabilitative environments in general. Nothing to do with patriarchal misogyny.
More recently, the UN's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, first adopted in 1955, states as one of the standards that "men and women shall so far as possible be detained in separate institutions; in an institution which receives both men and women the whole of the premises allocated to women shall be entirely separate". Their rationale was not patriarchal misogyny either, but rather how to maintain a safe and dignified environment for inmates.
Third gender in the cultures you allude to is typically just a way of othering gay man, of the "you can't be a real man" variety. It's nothing positive to emulate.
> My point is that that claim requires some level of supporting evidence.
The DOJ says 99% of rape and sexual assaults are by males, and that 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault are female and 9% male [1].
This is generic data, not trans specific or prison specific. But in the absence of specific data, it seems pretty relevant.
[1] U.S. Dept. of Justice, Violence Against Women Report, 2002. via https://stoprape.humboldt.edu/statistics
Okay, so ... statistically, would your average transwoman be taller than your average biowoman? Stronger? There's your power.
Any argument here about privacy is entirely independent of sex and gender. Prison is dehumanizing, address that. Don't be a transphobe.
Edit: There's a bunch of mistaken comments here assuming that this will protect women prisoners in some capacity. That's totally wrong! Women in prison are sexually assaulted, raped, and even impregnated by men all the time and have been for years. Those men are guards[0]. And this happens at a vastly higher rate per capita and overall than any assault by trans inmates. Anyone here with a legitimate interest in protecting women in prison would be attempting to address that harm, because it is far more dire for numerous reasons.
[0]: https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/the-rape-club-womens-priso...
I think you should take a moment to consider the (female) women in this situation. Imagine you're a woman 100% at the mercy of the state, and the state locks you in a cell with a male person. Put yourself in their shoes, and try to extend some empathy to them.
I think people in prison should be protected from other people in prison if they are dangerous, and I think prisons fail to do that today. I don't accept your presumption that having a penis makes someone inherently more dangerous.
Again: if your goal is to protect women in prison, the best way to do that is to advocate for reform that makes prisons safer for everyone. Not by being transphobic, which you're doing instead.
Perfect is the enemy of good and while it's hard to disagree with the sentiment of "reform that makes prisons safer for everyone ", we have no idea what that actually entails and that's so much of a monumental task that it's basically a non-starter. I feel like the sentiment here is "this wouldn't be a problem if we changed everything, so why don't we?"
I strongly agree; if you deprive someone of their liberty, then you take on the responsibility of protecting them - because you've deprived them of the ability to protect themselves.
I'm not aware of any prison regime that takes the safety of prisoners as a key objective. [Edit] Nor do I know of a state that handles the deliberate negligence of prisoner welfare as a criminal offence.
The data really really doesn't support your view. Men are objectively more dangerous.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251886/murder-offenders-...
https://stoprape.humboldt.edu/statistics
An estimated 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault are female and 9% male. Nearly 99% of perpetrators are male
Indeed and this is why feminist organizations, and others with an interest in women's rights and safety, push for policies of only employing female prison guards in women's prisons.
It's no stretch to see why they don't want male prisoners to be incarcerated there too, no matter how such males identity.
If the male guards can't be trusted not to sexually abuse women, how can you expect the same from cohabiting males?