bobalob

The problem is male prisoners, yes. Which is why segregating prisoners by sex is an essential component of safeguarding. And then further separation of vulnerable prisoners within each prison. If, in a male prison, there are inmates who desire to be women and are deemed to be at risk based on this, they should be separated from the general prison population, like other vulnerable prisoners are. Not transferred to a female prison.

Regarding the female category of sports, a sample of cells taken via a cheek swab can be used for karyotype testing, which would be sufficient for screening female athletes. This is much less intrusive than the anti-doping tests - which involve having blood taken and being observed urinating - that for many athletes is a requirement to compete. In the unusual case that the athlete has something other than 46,XX sex chromosomes, further analysis could be done - with the athlete's permission - to understand the underlying condition and, from this, determine eligibility to compete in this category.

No-one is advocating for all female athletes, including children, to undergo genital inspections. It isn't necessary and it's not being asked for.

Not as fringe as you may believe. Raymond's book sold a lot of copies. But more impactfully, radical feminist ideas on this topic and others continued to develop, and became increasingly influential from then to now.

One aspect of this that often isn't considered is how women with shared feminist ideals but differing political backgrounds have been working together across the aisle. As a result, radical feminists on the left have had significant influence on conservative policymakers via these informal collaborations. Look at EO 14168 for example.

Understood, but I would still recommend reading that article, as it addresses some of your points and you may find it an interesting perspective.

Feminists were protesting this way back in the 1970s. Janice Raymond even wrote a popular book about it.

Here's a review of her book, from 1979, which lays out many of the same points around this issue as are being discussed today: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/archives/male-and-female-...

This article is a good read, it explains why it's problematic to bestow upon men awards that were intended for women: https://www.filia.org.uk/latest-news/2018/9/21/does-the-appa...

In the case of prison policy, keeping prisoners strictly separated by sex, with no transfers of male prisoners into women's prisons allowed, under any circumstances.

Prisons should of course have safeguarding policy for further separation of vulnerable inmates within the prison.

Interestingly this is exactly what male prisoners with a transgender identity were requesting, according to https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/chase-strangio...:

> He teamed up with Lorena Borjas, the unofficial den mother to transgender Latinx women in New York City, to start the bail fund for transgender immigrants, and he joined a working group of lawyers who were drafting recommendations for President Obama's Department of Justice on the incarceration of trans people. "We asked people in prison what they needed, and they all said that they wanted a trans unit," Strangio said. But the lawyers in the working group, including Strangio, believed that L.G.B.T. units were stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system.

However they were ignored, and instead of this, a policy of transferring males to women's prisons was introduced.

> And how often has the latter actually happened?

Often enough to demonstrate that incarcerating males in women's prisons on the basis of self-declared "gender identity" is harmful policy that needs to be removed and cancelled everywhere it's been implemented.

It's worth keeping in mind that the reason we have sex-segregated prisons in the first place is because mixed-sex prisons were so demonstrably harmful to female inmates, who were subjected to physical violence, sexual assault, rape, impregnation by male prisoners.

> In any case, segregation of men and women in sports is a relatively new thing in history, dating back to around 1920-ish when the first bans for women appeared under the guise of "protecting their health / modesty". Plain and simple, men were afraid that women were just as competitive as they were, most sports are skill sports and not brute-strength sports.

You are confusing two separate things here: access to competitive sports, and having a separate female category in competitive sports. The former was denied to women for the same reasons that women were denied access to many aspects of society that men could freely enjoy. Whereas the latter - eliminating male physical advantage from competition - is necessary for fairness and, in the case of contact sports, for safety.

> Where does one want to draw the line?

Evidence-based policy approaches typically draw the line at the male physical advantage of testosterone-driven development.

So for example a male athlete with CAIS (complete insensitivity to androgens) may be permitted to compete in the women's category because testosterone was entirely ineffective from development in utereo onwards.

Whereas a male athlete with 5-ARD (impaired conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone) won't be, as the phenotype of micropenis and less facial hair doesn't eliminate the male physical advantage in sport.

It does. The sex of the former group is male, and the sex of the latter group is female.

Incarcerating female and male prisoners within the same prison environment means that it is mixed-sex.

What do you mean by "more aligned"?

Some names to search as examples of why this policy of incarcerating males in women's prisons is so harmful: Tremaine Carroll, Janiah Monroe, Demi Minor, Ramel Blount, Karen White.

To go back even further as to why prisons became sex-segregated in the first place, please look up the work of Elizabeth Fry. She documented the awful conditions in mixed-sex prisons of the 19th century, and how terrible this was for female prisoners. Her evidence helped bring in changes to the law that ensured female and male prisoners were separated.

That is a strong ideological belief, for sure.

Implementing it as policy in the prison system has been disastrous for female prisoners, with multiple cases of rape, assault and impregnation of incarcerated women by male inmates who claimed to be "not men" and gained access to women's prisons on that basis.

So it's good that this policy has been reversed and cancelled. It was a massive safeguarding failure that should never have happened in the first place.

The only sensible solution to that is segregation within male prisons, as is done for other vulnerable groups of inmates such as ex-cops, gang informants, pedophiles, child killers, and similar.

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.

It's what is already done for other classes of vulnerable inmates. They just need to put them there instead, problem solved.

This is good news for female prisoners, at least those in federal prisons.

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.