Consistent with the values of the organisation
Oh that’s okay, rape statistics don’t matter.
Police have been criticised for saying they will record rapes by offenders with male genitalia as being committed by a woman if the attacker “identifies as a female”.
Gee why would anyone criticize them for that?
The move, reported by The Scottish Sun on Sunday, comes ahead of proposed new laws to make it easier for people to self-identify as whichever sex they want, which are opposed by some feminist groups.
Feminists are funny that way. We think that only women are women, and that men (as it says on the label) are men.
MacAskill, who is the Alba party MP for East Lothian, having defected from the SNP, said: “As a lawyer for 20 years and justice secretary for almost eight, I’ve seen some legal absurdities. But this tops it all and is dangerous. It’s physically impossible and is about dogma overriding common sense. Women prisoners are being harmed by this and vital crime statistics rendered useless.”
…
Detective Superintendent Fil Capaldi said: “The sex/gender identification of individuals who come into contact with the police will be based on how they present or how they self-declare, which is consistent with the values of the organisation. Police Scotland requires no evidence or certification as proof of biological sex or gender identity other than a person’s self-declaration, unless it is pertinent to any investigation with which they are linked.”
But it is pertinent when it’s rape you absolute numpty.
Do you even know what “pertinent” means?
Also, N.B.,
So much for “gender is not the same thing as sex.”. Of course, that elision and equivocation was in the cards — the patent goal — ab initio, and obviously so. Women have been excoriated for supposedly not distinguishing properly between sex and gender, when it’s gender critical women who have scrupulously maintained the difference, all the while being berated for failing to do so. Classic projection/DARVO tactics. It’s disgusting.
I’m tired of all this bullshit done to “validate the feelings” of transgender offenders. Where’s the validation of MY feelings about wanting accurate sex-based statistics?
What I do not understand is why the police, or those in charge of them, should be agreeing to do this. It is not as though the police anywhere are particularly noted for the ‘enlightened’ or ‘woke’ values they espouse. What power is forcing this on them? — For it is a matter of power.
Maybe that’s the point — it’s an easy bone to throw to the Woke, in order to cover up the other stuff that the police do. Why is it easy? Because nobody cares about women.
So, this is inevitably going to lead to a rape victim on the stand being berated by a judge for refusing to call her rapist a women and using female pronouns isn’t it? I had a number of scenarios running through my head, each more horrifying than the last. I’m sure pink news would still manage to make the rapist into the real victim though. Misgendering! Literal violence! Elimination! Refusal to acknowledge the beauty and power of girl dick!
If the police were serious about being woke AND keeping accurate records, they could of course add a couple of columns to their spreadsheet. ‘Sex of offender as at birth’ might be a good start, and rename the ‘sex’ column as ‘identified sex’. But that might lead to formulation of good policy, so probably not.
I must admit I have somewhat mixed feelings on the prisons issue. I can see that trans woman inmates are at risk of being sexually assaulted in men’s prisons.
US figures bear this out – according to CBS they were more than 9 times more likely to face these issues in 2015:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-survey-transgender-inmates-more-likely-to-be-victims-of-sexual-assault/
At the same time, this article I think of this article from 2018 from the BBC.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42221629
Out of 125 trans prisoners on record in the UK in 2018, 60 were in for sexual offenses.
So about 40% of trans prisoners were there for sexual offenses. Cis male prisoners are far less likely to be in for sexual offenses.
The BBC puts in a proviso that this data may be incomplete, because it may have missed a lot of trans prisoners who were serving shorter sentences, but I don’t see why this wouldn’t be true of cis male prisoners too, thus I think it still produces a meaningful comparative.
I don’t know how this shakes out in the general population, trans individuals may well be less likely to offend in general, but general population figures aren’t the problem, prison populations are.
I think there is something to be said for both sides of the argument. We don’t want to sentence anyone to being sexually assaulted.
You can’t stick trans women in women’s prisons, otherwise the split between men’s and women’s prisons doesn’t make sense in the first place considering how cis male prisoners are actually less likely to have been sentenced for such crimes.
On the other hand, it doesn’t really make sense to send trans women to men’s prisons, for the same reason it wouldn’t make sense to send women to men’s prisons. They’re either at higher risk, or are a higher risk in both circumstances.
There is a need to find solutions here – but you can’t do that in these current circumstances where you’ve got an activist community noted for trying to render people unemployable over the most minor of offenses, telling us that concerns reflected by data are transphobic.
This forces us into an all or nothing state – and in such a state, I’m on team Terf, because team TRA is incapable of any sort of nuance on these issues, thus increasing risks for a much larger population. There probably are solutions to be found that reduce risks for everyone, but those solutions require being able to grapple with the issues, and that cannot be done when one side of the debate is consistent in acting in bad faith.
I like your thoughtful comment, Bruce and largely agree with you. The only sensible solution would be to provide a a small wing for the trans-prisoners, but that of course would cost money and neither the UK or the US seem anxious to spend money on prisons, except where building more of them is concerned, and in both countries, I think, the prisons are overcrowded because of the punitive ethos of Anglo-Saxondom.
Bruce Gorton #6
Who are the “cis male prisoners”?
I’m not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. I think it’s vital that we don’t adopt the other side’s language with its implicit framing of the issue. In the case of “trans” vs. “cis” the implicit framing (the foot in the door, the thin edge of the wedge, the Trojan horse) is that there is indeed such as category as “males” that “trans males” and “cis males” are both different versions/subsets of (to the exclusion of both “cis” and trans” women). In other words that “cis males” relate to “trans males” the way fruitbats relate to microbats and vampire bats, when in fact the real relationship is more like the one between fruitbats and baseball bats. Again, it’s all just a bad pun.
As I keep saying, if the individual formerly known as Ellen Page is a “man”/”male” then I’m not. There is no way to define “man”/”male” that applies to that person and me at the same time without rendering the distinction between “men” and “women”, “males” and “females”, utterly meaningless and empty.
Prisons are used to dealing with prisoners who’ll be vulnerable to assault if left in the general prison population – paedophiles, former police officers or prison guards and people who’ve testified against former associates all spring to mind. Certainly if George Zimmerman had been convicted he wouldn’t have been left to mingle with other inmates without any safeguards in place. There are various measures they can take to protect these prisoners, up to and including total segregation from the general population.
One possible response to this fact is to say that since they’re used to managing the risks that inmates pose to each other then the housing of trans males in a facility for females is just another variant of that routine situation. I don’t think that holds water for three reasons.
Firstly because in this case it’s the individual who poses a risk to the general mass of inmates, rather than the other inmates as a group presenting risk to the invidual.
Secondly because if the claim that trans women are women is taken seriously then the obvious next step is to protest that the segregation of transwomen is arbitrary and constitutes discrimination – housing them in a separate wing of a women’s prison concedes they should be in that facility and is a standing invitation to pressure groups to try to change the rules and have the separate facilities mixed.
Thirdly, part of the way prisons deal with the day to day fact that some categories of prisoner pose a risk to others is to keep them separate – sexual segregation in prisons is part of the organisational framework that’s used to manage that risk, and so it can’t be waved away with an appeal to the fact that prisons are used to managing risks.
So yes, I’m sympathetic to the fact that male trans prisoners may have vulnerabilities brought about by being trans and I’m supportive of efforts to protect them, but that protection can’t take the form of putting men into women’s prisons, any more than a prisoner convicted of a string of murders can be protected from the general population by being put into a facility where the other inmates are teenage car thieves.
The question of where to house prisoners brings up one glaring fact: our prisons need reform. The way we deal with prisoners is appalling and inhumane to begin with and simply extending the inhumane conditions one step further in women’s prisons isn’t at all acceptable, at least not to people who care about the decent treatment of other people, even ones they don’t much like.
But we aren’t having a conversation around prison reform, creating prisons where prisoners aren’t at danger from horrifying assaults by not only other prisoners, but guards. No, the conversation we are having is centered around one particular group – trans. Once again, trans have managed to center themselves and hijack the conversation we should be having into one that swirls around trans.
Trans ideology is like a vortex. It sucks everything else in.
I believe it already has.
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/warning-over-transgender-guidance-to-judges/5103196.article
Exactly.
Bruce, I think it’s pretty clear that both conservatives and liberals are pretty uniformly in favour of a punitive and carceral state. We put too many people in. prison and we tolerate conditions and practices that are unsafe and inhumane, because punishment. It’s appalling, but a separate issue from the one in the OP.
Rob
I’m not sure. When the police start identifying male rapists as women – that sort of normalizes the idea that those rapists should go to women’s prisons. I don’t think this is just a matter of “woke” semantics, but a real shift in how these cases are handled, with that as part of the end goal.
It is my understanding that:
– The portion of trans-identified male inmates exceeds the portion in the general male population;
– A substantial number of such trans inmates only declared being trans when they were or were about to be imprisoned;
– There are anecdotes of male prisoners in women’s prisons stating openly that they declared trans status specifically to access women.
If this is accurate, I suspect that keeping trans-identified male inmates separate from women, whether in separate housing or mixed with other males, would lead to a reduction in the proportion of trans-identifying male prisoners.
Maybe not, though, because it would still get them away from male violence (while taking male violence to the women prisoners).
Bruce, maybe I made my point badly. I think we agree that police should not classify male bodied rapists as women and they should not be sent to women’s prisons. My point is that all but the most progressive (or Libertarian?) believe that sending people to prison and making prisons awful places of retribution is a good thing. Now, I know that a lot of liberals would disagree and say they don’t approve of any such thing, but they still vote for political parties that campaign on more police, tougher laws, longer sentences. They also tolerate prison systems that are unsafe, unsanitary, overcrowded, and that do not provide the rehabilitation, health and counselling services many (most) prisoners need and that would actually benefit society.
Rob –
I’ve mostly thought that being separated from friends and family, out of society, hearing that train that they can’t ride is punishment enough for most people. I don’t think we need to make prisons any more horrible than they are. I don’t vote for the parties that want to tamp down on people, I would rather we address the root causes of crime (and yes, often it is just bad bad people.) But, that’s not how either of our main parties campaigns, and so I vote for the one party based on other issues.