When she was a man

I still can’t believe that grown-up journalism does this. The Beeb:

A trans woman who raped two women before she changed gender will not serve her sentence in a female jail, Scotland’s first minister has said.

Isla Bryson was remanded to Cornton Vale women’s prison after being convicted of carrying out the rapes when she was a man called Adam Graham.

“When she was a man” ffs. He is still a man. He always will be. It’s only men who can rape women.

Even in their own terms – the terms that say we must refer to men who say they are trans as “she” – there are very obvious reasons for thinking this guy is not actually trans in the sense of actually believing he has a magic gender. There are very obvious reasons for thinking he’s pretending to be trans, not least of which is opportunities to rape more women.

Bryson decided to transition from a man to a woman while awaiting trial.

Is that the BBC hinting that it knows perfectly well it’s a con?

But the BBC shouldn’t be hinting and it shouldn’t be lying to us about this rapey man.

Bryson is due to be sentenced next month after being convicted on Tuesday.

But where that sentence should be served has been the subject of heated debate, with concerns being raised about the safety of other women in the jail if Bryson [were] placed there.

Right, and this is why the entire mandate to pretend that men are women is such a bad dangerous harmful to women thing. (One why. Sadly, there are others.) This is why it needs to stop.

Speaking at First Minister’s Questions in the Scottish Parliament, Ms Sturgeon said she agreed with the chief executive of Rape Crisis that it was not possible to have a rapist within a women’s prison.

And what is a rapist? A man who rapes. Women can’t rape because women don’t have the body part that does the raping.

The first minister said any prisoner who posed a risk of sexual offending was segregated from other prisoners including while a risk assessment was carried out.

She said: “There is no automatic right for a trans woman convicted of a crime to serve their sentence in a female prison even if they have a gender recognition certificate.”

Why? Because they’re not in fact women. That applies to all trans women. Trying to force us all to lie about it is not going to work out.

The first minister also stressed it was careful [crucial?] that people “do not, even inadvertently, suggest that trans women pose an inherent threat to women”, adding: “Predatory men, as has always been the case, are the risk to women.”

Yes, and trans women are all men, and some of them are predatory. For that reason they pose the same kind of generalized threat to women that men do: the threat created by the fact that we can’t tell which ones are predatory so we are forced to take generalized precautions around men we don’t know. That’s why it’s not safe for us to pretend men can be women.

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