It’s about the lady rapists
Joan Smith on Rowling and the loonies who long to CanCel her:
Gender extremists hate Rowling not just because she is famous and has a platform, but because her barbs hit home. She uses language precisely, avoiding ad feminam abuse and hyperbole, while they — how can I put this politely? — do not.
It’s about this business of ratifying men as women on a mere assertion. If a man says he’s a woman then he’s a woman, says the Scottish government, and if he’s a woman why then if he blots his copybook he gets imprisoned with his fellow women.
Police Scotland admitted as much in a response to a question from a former SNP justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, about how they would deal with rapists when the new law comes into force. Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie confirmed that a rapist who was ‘born male, but who identifies as a female’ could be recorded as a woman without even going through the process of getting a gender recognition certificate. This is already happening in England and Wales, where a staggering 436 male-bodied sex offenders were classified as women between 2012 and 2018.
Rowling’s intervention is crucial because this issue, more than trans-identified males demanding to use women’s toilets or changing rooms, is one that exercises a wide swathe of opinion. People baulk at the prospect of vulnerable women prisoners, many of them victims of domestic violence, being forced to share intimate spaces with men who have been convicted of serious sex offences. Rowling has experienced domestic abuse herself, so she knows how unpalatable this is. She also knows exactly how and when to intervene — and that makes her a very dangerous adversary.
Just ask Seth Abramson.
I suppose they see it this way: put one biomale in with several biowomen, and one or more of the biowomen could get sexually assaulted before the biowomen got the upper hand, regardless of how the bioman is dressed. But shove a bioman who dresses as a woman into confinement with a bunch of biomales with form for violence, and he could get killed or severely injured, or severely injured THEN killed, with lots of bother resulting, forms to fill out, questions to answer; stuff like that.
The safest course therefore from the station commander’s or prison warden’s point of view is lock them in with members of the sex they claim to belong to. Anything for a bit of peace and quiet.
Jail and prison facilities have already had to make accommodations to house vulnerable male inmates. Child molesters and former LEOs already have separate wings to protect them from the general population. They know how to protect vulnerable inmates already. It’s not the women’s problem. Men should solve it among themselves. It’s not forever women’s burden to solve men’s problems. That’s just sexism and misogyny all over again.
I suppose they see it this way: women don’t matter.
I’ll try this again. If AFAB people (for the sake of brevity I’ll say “women”) who are only attracted to other women number around 2% of the female population (this is what I get from a quick look at various surveys and studies) it seems odd that so many transwomen are calling themselves “lesbians.” The typical female experience is that women are attracted to AMAB people. This makes transwomen atypical if they want to claim that they’re women. (Certainly the subject needs studying and I daresay any study would probably produce fascinating results.)
It’s suprisingly difficult to find anything remotely relevant to the question of what percentage of the female population commit sexual assault/rape. There are articles that tell me that around 5% of the people charged with sex crimes are women. One Canadian study said that 9/10 of the women convicted of sex crimes were sexually and physically abused themselves. Regardless, from what we see everyday, the vast majority of the perpetrators of sexual assaults are AMAB or “men,” with very few women appearing on the news as rapists. (Calling transwomen rapists “women” is, as we all know, going to make things very confused. It will make dealing with the issue of sexual assault needlessly more complicated.)
But my point is that so few women commit sex crimes. But, considering that all transpeople are only (according to one study I just glanced at) only 0.3% of the US population, there sure seem to be a lot of transwomen in prison for rape.
To sum up: The vast majority of women are not lesbians. But a lot of transwomen say they are. The vast majority of women do not commit sexual assault. But a disproportionate number of transwomen are convicted rapists.
It’s almost as if they’re different somehow.
I don’t really have anything to add, I just wanted to say that I read that about six times and enjoyed it more each time.
Butterflies & Wheels: you come for the critical thinking, but you stay for the delicious writing!
I’ve got no numbers on this, obviously, but I’d hazard that a disproportionate number of transwoman are convicted rapists as compared to the *male* population as a whole.
I don’t know if I am missing something here but given the legal definition of rape in UK law, the proportion of “women” who are rapists and also trans must be 100%.