Here's the problem I have with this line of defense: it doesn't accommodate the reality of self-id and the likely downstream effects if it becomes the accepted norm. If all it takes for a male to be housed in a female prison is a checkmark on a form, we should expect that many cis-men will take advantage of the situation, thus creating a very real threat of abuse for women in women prisons. If I were being locked up for an extended period of time and all it took was a declaration to be housed in a female prison, I would do it. I would go from one of the smaller and weaker inmates to one of the biggest and strongest. It is a no-brainer in terms of my personal safety. And I have no interest in abusing anyone or taking advantage of forced-proximity. Imagine how many abusers would take advantage of that circumstance? An argument in defense of gender-affirmation in prison assignments that doesn't accommodate this likely reality isn't substantive.
That's not at all what it takes.
>Imagine how many abusers would take advantage of that circumstance?
Imagine how many abusers already take advantage of the power they already have over women in women's prisons. That the real problem of sexual violence is focused and framed wholly and entirely on trans women is exactly the point made by the parent: this is an entirely disingenuous effort by people wholly uninterested in actually preventing the real, existing, non-imagined abuses in women's prisons and more interested in enforcing a strict gender binary that harms both cis and trans women.
In fact, it is all it takes in some jurisdictions[1]
>Imagine how many abusers already take advantage of the power they already have over women in women's prisons.
This is a disingenuous reply. The issue of abuse is colored by the difficulty in mitigation, i.e. available funds to significantly alter prisons, increase guards, etc. The fact that existing abuse has no easy, cost-effective solutions is not an argument against preventing the likely increase in abuse due to policy changes which are comparatively low-cost.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-05/californ...
>Thornton said that “a person’s gender identity is self-reported and CDCR will evaluate any request submitted by an incarcerated person for gender-based housing.”
This CDCR review process is a hurdle, and staffers are hypervigilant (to the point of manufacturing anxiety) of the transfers that have already happened.
>But Moore, 43, said that she has also heard staffers question inmates housed with Calvin, asking whether she has exposed herself, explained her sexual behavior to them or said things that made them uncomfortable. She said the questioning has fomented anxiety and false rumors that Calvin is in a relationship.
>...when groundbreaking legislation gave transgender, intersex and nonbinary inmates the right, regardless of anatomy, to choose whether to be housed in a male or female prison... When asked whether inmates in the men’s prisons trying to manipulate the transfer system has been a significant issue, Thornton said that “a person’s gender identity is self-reported and CDCR will evaluate any request submitted by an incarcerated person for gender-based housing.”... Inmates can request transfers to their correctional counselor, which are then considered by a committee that includes the warden, custody, medical and mental health staffers, and a PREA compliance manager. Staffers review the inmate’s criminal record, health needs, custody level, sentence and safety concerns.
There's certainly room for interpretation here, but it seems like the evaluation is based on specific personal requirements and any explicit safety concerns, not a medical or psychological exam to determine whether the request is due to one's genuine identity.
You keep combining impregnation and sexual assault as if they're the same thing. Cis women are already sexually assaulted by other cis women in prisons! This is not a problem created anew by housing trans women in women's prisons. I venture that the problem is not trans women, the problem is the assumption that prisons cannot stop inmates from sexually assaulting each other.
To completely stop sexual assault in prisons, people would have to be housed in separate cells. Housing cis-women and trans-women in the same cell does not stop the sexual assault problem.
In that case you're hard pressed to argue why housing trans women in women's prisons exacerbates this issue, unless you think trans women are more likely to be rapists. Excluding an entire population on the basis that some of them might rape people is not just if rape is already a problem.
> To completely stop sexual assault in prisons, people would have to be housed in separate cells.
I mostly agree, but it's very easy to construct a solution to these problems while ignoring the present reality. Almost no trans people are currently housed in prisons that accord with their gender identity, and 35% of trans people in prisons themselves report having been sexually assaulted in the past year as of 2015 [1]. The status quo is pretty dire for them too, and their safety should be weighed against the safety of the cis people they might otherwise be housed with.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/transgender-women-ar...
I think both of these concerns can be addressed. None of the options address everyone's needs and preferences, but are certainly better than leaving trans-women completely vulnerable in men's prisons.
1) House trans-women in a separate part of men's prisons so that they are not at high risk of sexual assault. Some people do not like this because it doesn't affirm their gender identity.
2) House trans-women in prisons for trans people. This is likely unrealistic because the number of people is small and for most inmates it would mean spending prison time far away from their community, making it harder for friends and family to visit.
3) House trans-women in women's prisons, but not force cis-women to share a cell with intact trans-women. This scenario would remove the threat that trans-women face, affirm their gender identity, but not impose an unfair burden on cis-women who fear being sexually assaulted and impregnated by intact trans-women.
I think scenario (3) goes most of the way in protecting trans-women from sexual assault, allows them to serve their sentences (hopefully not too far away from family), yet still acknowledges that many cis-women in prison have been sexually assaulted or fear sexual assault by people with penises because it can result in pregnancy which creates an entire new set of physical, psychological, and moral challenges for that cis-woman.
Sexual assault by correctional officers is a problem that also needs to be better addressed. But that's true regardless of the question on how to house incarcerated trans-women.
With regards to the danger of trans people being sexually assaulted in prisons: yes, it is absolutely a problem. MyHypatia literally made the same point you're making in their original comment.
> Without any stats for transwomen in particular, human males are more likely to be rapists, and an intact transwoman is closer to a man than a ciswoman is, no?
This argument is rather tangential. Is there any empirical evidence that trans women are more likely to sexually assault people than cis women? Is the median trans woman more likely to sexually assault people than cis women who have been convicted of sexual assault, or who have already committed sexual assault in the prison?
> MyHypatia literally made the same point you're making in their original comment.
Specifically, they said that putting trans women in women's prisons would be imposing the threat of rape on cis women. After I pointed out that cis women already rape other cis women in women's prisons, they clarified that it was actually impregnation they were really worried about introducing, not rape as such. I don't think my criticism of this concern has been addressed.
I don't think there are enough transwomen in prisons to make any reasonable statistical statement about transwomen in particular being more or less likely to be rapists. And I don't really think the argument is tangential. People with penises are more likely to be rapists than people without them, this is a clear statistical reality. If a large population of people are being held together, historically because they did not possess penises, and are worried about the introduction of someone with a penis (who statistically is much more likely to be a rapist by nature of having a penis), I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that gender identity is a confounding factor in those statistics. And if there isn't a difference between having a penis and not having one in this circumstance, why do we even need to have gendered prisons?
With regards to MyHypatia, I was referring to the fact that, in the second half of your comment to which I initially replied, it seemed like you felt MyHypatia did not recognize the direness of the trans situation in prisons. But they clearly do, as evidenced by this from their first comment:
> The fear that transgender women have of rape in a men's jail is real
It may be used to describe their foreskin, but I've never heard or seen it used to describe them as whole people. It sounds very odd. What is the negation of intact? You can't really use a word to describe a category exclusively without implying the opposite of the other category.
> People with penises are more likely to be rapists than people without them, this is a clear statistical reality.
I don't think you can argue this is a clear statistical reality without data about trans women. As far as I know contemporary research suggests sexual assault by women has been historically undercounted. I don't know if the numbers come out similar in the end, but it seems like the kind of thing that is easily colored by social bias.
> If a large population of people are being held together, historically because they did not possess penises
Is it because they didn't have penises? Or because they weren't men? I don't know of any specific information, but this is an important distinction, because the general perception for a long time has been that men are more violent than women, and I think it's more because of male secondary sexual characteristics (muscle tone and height, mainly) than primary. Would a burly intersex person with high testosterone and ambiguous genitalia who sexually assaulted somebody have been put in a women's prison? Should they be today?
> And if there isn't a difference between having a penis and not having one in this circumstance, why do we even need to have gendered prisons?
I don't know, but I do think it's worth asking the question! Do we segregate people by gender because it's fundamentally necessary, or because our prison system is so brutal that we can't imagine inmates of different genders living together peacefully? There could very well be science on this subject that I'm not aware of, but on its face the sexual segregation of American prisons seems hard to separate from their brutality and corruption.
Sexual assault by women being undercounted does not account for the fact that most estimates put male perpetrators at around 90% of sexual assault cases. It would have to be severe undercounting (in anonymous surveys to boot) to get anywhere close to make up for that divide. Also, unless I am misinformed, I was under the impression that the majority of transwomen share male secondary sex characteristics – I have certainly not seen any indication that transwomen are shorter than the average male and would not expect that to be the case, given that the majority of trans people alive today were not on puberty blockers + hormone therapy before any such primary sex characteristics could do their thing in puberty.
Historically, being a man was having a penis. At the end of the day, humanity is a sexually reproducing species and there are two fundamental sexes required for procreation (intersex individuals notwithstanding). For better or for worse, human societies have divided themselves along this line (as best they could judge) since time immemorial. Given this universality, it seems incredibly unlikely that the various discrepancies between men and women (whether with rape or anything else) can be explained away by society / sociological conditioning (and therefore fixed by a change in the same).
I fully agree that the solution is to look at the problem holistically and question whether a system which allows for any sex/gender to be raped by any other sex/gender is a system that should be maintained. But as it stands, that system is still around, so we can't just pretend the decisions we've made going into that system are totally irrelevant and now that we're "more enlightened individuals" we can just switch things up without that fundamental revisiting. Said another way, this strikes me as a bit of a Chesterton's fence situation: I don't know exactly why we decided to make men's and women's prisons, but until we've firmly established that "why", I don't think it is sensible to use our 21st century definition of "men" and "women" and apply it to systems that were not made with those definitions in mind.
1. "Intact" is straight-up offensive. I was trying to explain why without saying so (because people on here always seem to object that something isn't offensive when I say it is) but you didn't get it, or I did a poor job of explaining. The term implies that trans women with vaginas merely have damaged penises, and made a choice to ruin their bodies, and consequently that cisgender bodies are better, because they are always intact. That is where it originates from.
2. Many human societies throughout history up to today have recognized at least three genders, most famously for the US, indigenous Americans with two-spirit people. It is incidental, not inherent, that Western culture does not have a category like this outside of scientific classification.
3. Feminists ostensibly believe in equality between men and women. This idea that men are uncontrollable rapists, and that women are defenseless and purely innocent, seems blatantly sexist to me. Sure, men are especially violent in our society. It's plainly true. They also happen to hold most of the power in our society. The concept of rape culture goes a long way to explaining why men rape people and are generally more violent: it is condoned by the people who hold most of the power. Justice for trans people is inseparable from justice for all women, and the destruction of patriarchy. That's what I was trying to get at in talking about the obvious violence in the US prison system. The state treating people with violence legitimizes people treating each other with violence, and that's only the start. Humans are highly intelligent and by all accounts we have, through great effort, managed to become much less violent in our dealings with each other over time, for the most part. At some point you can't blame animal instinct for choices that humans make.
2. Two-spirit was a term invented in 1990, so that seems like a bad example of a concept that has existed throughout history. Even the concept of a "special third gender" necessitates that you have two primary ones. I am not arguing that every society throughout history has had two distinct gender roles and that is all. The point I am making is that the reason gender exists as a concept at all is because there are distinct human sexes. The reason there are distinct sexes is because that is what we are: a sexually reproducing species with binary sex characteristics. One sex that produces the large gamete and one sex that produces the small, which come together to form zygote, which is incubated by the aforementioned large gamete provider. If it worked in any other way, if there was any variation on this theme, you and I would not exist. Your progeny involves one male having sex with one female and the female carrying the result of that in her womb for at least 20+ weeks (usually 40) in an unbroken line back to the first human, and then much, much further.
3. I never claimed men were uncontrollable rapists, just that the statistics (to the best of our ability to measure them) indicate that rapists are far more prevalent among males than among females. Clearly the vast majority of men are capable of not raping people. Furthermore, "rape culture" is a strange way of describing a culture which has harsh punishments for rapists and frequently makes people unemployable after the mere accusation of rape, with little proof needed (name another crime we do that for as readily). In fact if I was going to invent a "rape culture" from scratch those things would definitely be the opposite of what I'd include as norms.
Look, if you want to dismantle the prison system because it normalizes and perpetuates horrible violence, then by all means say that. But this is not at all the same thing as saying "we can just stick people in whichever prison best matches their gender identity regardless of what reasons we had for making men's and women's prisons in the first place because clearly the people who made that decision were poorly reasoning morons/bigots who had no reason to make such a distinction". Just as saying "we should develop more gender-neutral bathrooms" is different from saying "men and women's bathrooms are functionally identical just with different signs on the doors", even though men's bathrooms were clearly designed around the assumption that users of said bathroom are likely to have a functioning penis.
I personally think that we as a society should move away from gendering everything in general. Bathrooms, clothes, toys, prisons, makeup, etc. could all be much more gender neutral than they are and I think that would be a good thing. Until then, when talking about interim solutions, "are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater" is a valid question.
Justice for everyone is inseparable from justice for anyone.
With that said, the focus on genitalia strikes me as odd and really unfounded in the first place for a productive conversation.
In this context, if a trans-woman doesn't have a penis then this fear is unfounded and they should be housed with cis-women. If a trans-woman does have a penis, then I think this fear is reasonable (after all, that is what trans-women are escaping when they leave men's prisons). Basically, this is one of the few cases where discussing genitalia is relevant.