This is such a tough issue to deal with, definitely in the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" category in my book.
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.
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.
I didn't mean tone as in the intonation of your words, I meant the specific words you chose and what they imply.
You made it clear that you know where I currently stand on the topic, where I have stood on it in the past, what I do or don't know, and that you're way of viewing the topic is right and I just need to "see the light" as it were.
All of that was very clear in your written words, verbal intonation was needed to know what you meant and how you viewed me in that exchange.
You really like to read a lot more into my words then are (or ever could be) there.
Let be be more explicit: my original comment was just to take the point you were not quite making and instead make it explicit… prisons don’t work at all, and can’t work if their intent isn’t to keep everyone safe.
I’m not a fan whatsoever of the “sex is almost universally binary” statement, as nothing can possibly be “almost universally” binary; there are either precisely two options or what you do not have is a binary. I also am not a fan of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thought-terminating cliche, or your response to someone (very rightly) pointing out that there’s a greater evil in those two choices… but I wasn’t actually criticizing your point or your beliefs or you, just your rather ambiguous wording. I only got critical at the point of pointless tone-policing, since “tone” is practically impossible to correctly surmise in a written communication.
I don’t know a thing about you, except that you appear easily distracted by fuzzy thinking. This, of course, is almost universally human, so I’m not being even remotely sarcastic here, either.
Assuming that prisons should be segregated by something like sex is shunting the problem off on women.
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.
That's plainly false. Incarcerated women have already been raped, beaten, and impregnated by men in women's prisons. Men, including transgender women, are bigger and stronger than women and will use that to their advantage.
A heterosexual transgender woman intends to deploy those genitals on women. That makes it a problem for uninvolved women that shouldn't have to worry about men in women's spaces.
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.
Trans women are men that suffer from an unfortunate condition. We need to accept this. Trying to gaslight people into denying basic reality created a backlash that was partially responsible for giving us Trump.
I am not a man. I am a trans woman. I don't suffer from an unfortunate condition, unless that condition is ignorant people like yourself who cannot handle the complexity of how people can be different.
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.
Sorry, but this is exactly what I'm talking about. Trans women are a subset of men. Taking cross-sex hormones and getting surgery won't actually change your sex. It's the best we can do for now until we figure out how to fix the brain-body mismatch.
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".
I am not a subset of men and thinking in binaries isn't going to help you here. Even sex is not a binary when you consider that chromosomes beyond XX/XY exist and that the expression of chromosomes does not necessarily result in a genital configuration you might expect (not to mention the wide variety of configurations within the binary).
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.
Genital configurations are a distraction. You can get incomplete/malformed genitals in individuals with disorders of sex development, but that doesn't change their sex.
> Trans people are not beating up [cis] women in sports.
> 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.
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.
The hazard rate of a violent act is much higher among violent offenders, and it would be inhumane to put everyone in solitary confinement, even if you could afford it. Therefore, a prison containing violent offenders will never be as safe as the overall outside population.
In many cultures, exile or retribution was the answer to murder, and to prevent things getting so heated, strong and secure family and community bonds go a long way.
American prisons (I'm American, and also don't know much about non-US prisons) continue to be a great way to take advantage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and thus continue to benefit from slave labor.
My military uniform was made by enslaved people, for example.
I'm with Angela Davis and numerous other abolitionists on this topic.
Let’s back up: what do we need to do to keep these (and other) inmates safe?
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?
Im curious how the status quo compares with respect to the safety angle.
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.
Putting criminal offenses under a microscope vis a vis their penalties would be a good start. A fair number of offenses should probably carry shorter prison sentences or none at all, having been overly influenced by decades of "war on drugs" and "tough on crime" policies.
It is a black mark on our society that the US continues to lead the world in both per capita and absolute prison population.
Funding corrections systems at an appropriate level where violence is an exception, not the norm. If you can’t afford to do it, you can’t afford to incarcerate.
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.
I understand you are making a moral argument, not a physics argument, but it still doesnt seem to be self evident.
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?
Your argument already breaks down when you ask me personally. The argument is “how much are we willing as a society to keep people we incarcerate safe?” The answer should be “as much as it costs” instead of “that is not my problem.” It is our problem if the incarcerated are not safe when incarcerated, because we are incarcerating them.
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.
Would you give up every single thing you have? If that wasn't enough, would you really let them go free?
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.
My rhetorical claims are that we have the necessary wealth to ensure the safety of those we choose to incarcerate. That is objectively true, based on all available evidence, even if you disagree.
> 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?
That seems like a super reasonable compromise: a separate, segregated unit in a men's prison.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I cannot speak to prison policies that have created conditions for the attacks you have mentioned, but a blanket policy putting trans women in men's prisons is putting their lives at risk, while a case-by-case policy is not necessarily putting cis women's lives at risk if it is implemented well.
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.
Can we first agree that this case is a terrible one, in which a man intentionally identified as a woman in order to get the chance to rape women?
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.
Your question made me wonder enough to read the article. It said:
> 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
> 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.
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.