Federal prisons prep to move trans inmates as early as next week
npr.org
npr.org
There's just not good, clean answer. Sex is almost universally binary (there are exceptions, though very rare). Gender is by no means binary though, its a totally different concept that just happens to correlate well enough to sex for most people.
I'd like this to be a scenario where you just don't have prisons if you can't decide how to effectively group people and keep them safe. Most people wouldn't go for that though, we very much like punishing people for their mistakes and making them trade months or years of their life as penance.
It is hard to imagine another country taking them, and any no-mans land the US establishes would likely be at least as hellish as the prison system.
Do we just keep dumping them on some island to Battle Royale/ Hunger games? is that more humane?
Do you believe that someone who committed murder deserves to be held against their will in an unsafe environment?
My point isn't that prisons must be completely safe and nothing could ever go wrong. They should, though, be on par with the relative safety of the world outside prison walls.
Absolutely. Give them what they want. Give them a taste of their own medicine. If they don't want to be civilized - don't give them civility.
They can call themselves a man, woman or air fryer, it’s almost irrelevant. What’s essential (and being lost in the hair-picking exercise of trying to solve for a universal theory of gender and sex) is that they not be shanked while Twitter has an incel side panel on sex ed.
We divide inmates by more than just sex. We put sex offenders, literal rapists and pedophiles, in separate accommodation for their safety. Why can’t we do the same for trans folk? Even if you believe they’re deranged, what right does anyone have to extend their disgust to damnation?
The situation is complicated. But not tough.
Is the primary safety concern sexual violence, or hate crimes? I imagine pregnancy would also be a concern.
If the main concern is sexual assault, can imagine there are risks either way, status quo and ex-post. If the concern is hate crimes, I could imagine trans people also suffering under either case. Prison is a high risk place.
Solitary confinement would also be a rights violation.
American prisons are about making humans suffer though (vs rehabilitation) as inexpensively as possible, so I don’t see this changing in the near future.
Dont get me wrong, I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the "corrections" system. Incarceration itself is a loss of rights. Which rights and how much is clearly a gradient, not binary.
How much would you personally pay to keep a murderer or rapist off your street before you compromised on their safety? Would you really let them go if you and your family were at risk?
I pay >$100k/year in federal income tax alone, I am not allergic to paying taxes to buy civilization. I’ll pay more, and I would expect others at my economic strata to do the same. My problem is with the people who argue to lock up “dangerous criminals” and don’t want to pay the true costs. Their danger doesn’t cause them to not be entitled to safety vs violence in imposed captivity.
If that's your absolutist moral position, then I think that is consistent with what you said.
I don't think most people would agree. I think that tolerable costs are finite.
The cost to ensure a reasonable amount of safety may in fact be tolerable, but that is a separate position from the absolutist one.
I'm pretty skeptical that someone would sacrifice their entire wealth to de-risk prisons, and I'm naturally skeptical that they would sacrifice the lives of their children before they put a prisoner in a risky position. This is what your rhetorical claims boil down to.
I thought I was pretty clear that I was taking issue with the absolutist ultimatum:
>If you can’t afford to do it, you can’t afford to incarcerate.
That is an entirely different position than saying we can easily afford it and should.
It is a black mark on our society that the US continues to lead the world in both per capita and absolute prison population.
That seems like a super reasonable compromise: a separate, segregated unit in a men's prison.
If prisons worked (as anything but a source of cheap labor) all Americans would be safe.
Even assuming your binary exists — it doesn’t — a heterosexual cisgender woman is, obviously, under no additional risk being housed with a heterosexual transgender woman… it’s not the genitals that are the problem, it’s whom do you intend to deploy those genitals on.
That laugh aside, I’m not sure you made your point; once more, the heterosexual cisgender woman is in less danger from a heterosexual transgender woman than she is from another otherwise cisgender woman who will aggressively pursue any port in a storm.
If you want to argue for not segregating prisons by sex, then you should just state that. If that ever happens you'll quickly find out how terrible of an idea it is.
Blaming us for the backlash is the same abusive thinking as "i wouldn't hit you if you'd just do what i want." Trans people are just the easiest target. If it wasn't us, it'd have been someone else.
Denying simple biological reality will get us more fascism. It's not the entire reason, but it's easy to whip people up about trans issues when you literally have men beating up women in sports. Your average person will never accept that, and that's something you just need to accept because you can't change it.
Note that I said "partially responsible". The fundamental reason is that the DNC doesn't give a shit about the working class and rejects actual leftist ideals, but trying to push unpopular social issues on top of that just killed their chances.
Some day, we'll arrive at a happy medium of "trans women are not women but that's fine and let them live their lives in peace".
Calling it "biological reality" is a massive oversimplification of biology that is used to stir unease towards trans people. Trans people are not beating up [cis] women in sports. This is another story to stir up fear and hatred, and you're just repeating it thoughtlessly.
Most of what you're seeing politically is defending a vulnerable group from unwarranted attacks by a powerful political party backed by moneyed interests sowing division as a distraction from the real problems. If the right weren't so focused on taking away trans people's rights to bodily autonomy and existence, you wouldn't be hearing about us so much.
I am going to repeat some of what I replied to someone else...
Birth sex is not useful when talking about trans people, who may be on hormone replacement therapy or have had gender affirming surgeries. To fixate on that is to deny the reality that trans people don't necessarily fit into the gender binary (and at the same time many do). Our systems are structured by gender binaries and so accommodations need to be made for those who don't fit perfectly (which also helps cis women who do not present as traditionally feminine).
The notion that trans women are inherently dangerous to cis women, which is the conclusion you seem to be arriving at because you are thinking of trans women as men, is a false notion.
Cis men are the greatest danger to cis women. If the amount of attention being placed on trans women were instead being placed on that fact, maybe cis women would actually be safer.
Trans people exist and always have. Right now we are being demonized because we are an easy target. And when folks like you buy into that, you are doing the demonizing work for the people who are controlling through division. Trans people are not a problem to be solved. We're just fighting to keep our rights from being taken away.
> Trans people are not beating up [cis] women in sports.
This is plainly false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallon_Fox#Mixed_martial_arts_...
> During Fox's fight against Tamikka Brents on September 13, 2014, Brents suffered a concussion, an orbital bone fracture, and seven staples to the head in the 1st round. After her loss, Brents took to social media to convey her thoughts on the experience of fighting Fox: "I've fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can't answer whether it's because she was born a man or not because I'm not a doctor. I can only say, I've never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right", she stated. "Her grip was different, I could usually move around in the clinch against other females but couldn't move at all in Fox's clinch."
There's more examples here, but can we both agree that your statement is incorrect?
You almost understand the truth. Forcing people into strict gender roles based on social mores is bad. Men can wear dresses and women can wear pants, etc. What I hope you'll understand is that just because you don't follow gender stereotypes doesn't mean you can change your sex. A man taking cross-sex hormones and getting surgery is still a man. Let's not sell him the lie that he will ever be a woman. Let's enlighten him that he should live his life and engage in as many masculine or feminine activities as he sees fit.
Incarcerating males in the female prison estate was an absurd and demonstrably harmful policy, and it's very good news that this will now no longer be the case in the federal prison system.
Hopefully the federal government can take measures to keep male inmates out of women's prisons and jails at the state and local levels as well. Perhaps through conditions attached to federal funding.
Tremaine Carroll is a good example of why we need to stop coddling people's feelings on this.
There's more cases, but if we can't agree on ground truth in such an obvious case then there probably won't be common ground for calculating statistics.
But like everything else, Musk and his lackey Trump only cares about how much they can pilfer from the US.
Musk is a failed father, particularly when it comes to his trans kid(s). This might be a personal thorn for him that will wreak havoc and waste public resources to salve.
> Previous data from the BOP website indicated there are 1,529 transgender women and 744 transgender men in custody. It's also unclear how many are currently housed in prisons according to their birth sex versus their gender identity.
Of course, The issue is complicated by levels of security. However, a tran-man and a trans-women prison would at least eliminate the hypothetical problem of pregnancy during incarceration. It would be interesting to see numbers on that as well in the current status that has people assigned male and female at birth in the same facilities