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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Dreher's Law defied? Transgender rapist Isla Bryson moved to men's prison

After years of haranguing feminists and critics for suggesting that things like self-ID would lead to women being potentially at risk as unsafe males entered women's spaces, the topic has burst unto the scene as a rapist in Scotland sought movement into a female prison because he "transitioned" after being caught.

The basic economic logic of "if barriers are removed from socially deleterious activities people will do them" proven once again. Yet it somehow evades certain parts of the political spectrum.

Isla Bryson was remanded to Cornton Vale women's prison in Stirling after being convicted of the rapes when she was a man called Adam Graham. She has since been moved to HMP Edinburgh.

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

She was taken to a male wing of HMP Edinburgh on Thursday afternoon.

It came after First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that Bryson would not be allowed to serve her sentence at Cornton Vale.

This situation seems to have proven to be a boondoggle for the SNP. Sturgeon faced resistance in her own party to passing gender legislation already and the UK government even blocked it for equality concerns (leading to a -cynical imo - row on devolution as well, which I'm sure Sturgeon would prefer to be the issue).

Now this case came up and caused a bit of a stir. Sturgeon came out proactively and reassured everyone, saying that no rapists will be allowed into female prisons, making it clear where she stood & using the "risk assessment" argument to save face: every trans applicant will go through risk assessment therefore there's no problem unless they come to a wrong decision. Of course, the problem seems to be that a) these people are assessed at the female prison and b) maybe the best system is no system. All this effort won't change the fundamental reality of males vs. females so why not use the rule of thumb that works the vast majority of the time? Certainly, if the FM has to come out and reassure Scots that the right decision will be reached in each of these cases that says something about their confidence.

Of course, I've not seen even a hint of reflection on this from the very people who called it bigoted to suggest that weakening gender barriers and implementing self-ID would lead to these ludicrous situations. If anything, activists seem to be doubling down on the claim that anyone who raised the alarm about this was just being bigoted instead of letting the process play out.

Meanwhile, a second plane has struck the Towers

"Predatory men, as has always been the case, are the risk to women"

says Nicola Sturgeon. Well, if this prisoner is not a man, then they're not a predatory man. If they're not a predatory man, then they are not a threat to women. If they are not a threat to women, then they should pass their risk assessment.

So, it follows from her view that even though the prisoner should not be transferred to the women's prison, they should be.

Yvette Cooper just seems overwhelmed by the whole matter:

"It should be clear that if someone poses a danger to women and committed crimes against women, they should not be being housed in a women's prison"

I am pretty confident that Cooper has never been to Cornton Vale, though she may have been to other women's prisons given she's Shadow Home Secretary. She would know that there are a lot of prisoners who are dangers to women and who have committed crimes against women. Sexual crimes? Well, probably not convicted, but "crime" and "sex crime" are not the same thing. One of the main reasons to put female criminals in a prison is that they are dangerous to other women. One would hope that Cooper, if she is going to be Home Secretary, would know that already.

I can see that Nicola Sturgeon is trying to say "not all trans people" and that's perfectly true. There are a lot of trans women out there who are not sex offenders and rapists.

The problem is the loudmouth activists and the crazy ones, as well as the predatory guys who suddenly discover their inner femaleness when the prospect of being sent to a men's jail and having the shit kicked out of them arises. If, like J.K. Rowling, you can be vilified as a TERF and have people doing their best to destroy you (thankfully their best is not very good at all) simply for commonsense observations that hey, maybe putting people with dicks in the same space as people who have been hurt by people with dicks is not a good idea, then we're going to have more of this kind of thing: the rapist was always a Real Woman and you are the insensitive boor for deadnaming her.

We really are going to have to look hard at the idea of transgender being a mental health issue, if the likes of these guys are going to be cropping up again and again. Maybe they really are trans, but it's all part of a pathology. It's a gradient - dysphoria is a mental health issue, but you have milder (person just wants to transition and live like an ordinary person) and graver (sex offenders who are probably getting off on the notion of being a woman).

We really are going to have to look hard at the idea of transgender being a mental health issue, if the likes of these guys are going to be cropping up again and again.

I feel like we should have looked at it hard as a mental illness or paraphilia when people started to suggest surgically removing their genitals. Like...we don't need more than that. Prima facie that is a strong indicator of potential mental illness that needs to be examined.

But an utterly contingent act of sidling up to another sexual minority civil rights movement seems to have led to people to be less critical in assuming that this is just more of the same: a harmless deviation from the norm.

And somehow the fact that trans are making claims that gays didn't (e.g. you need to provide an intensive suite of self-modification tools so I can pretend to be a woman or I will kill myself vs. just don't be bigoted towards me) doesn't seem to penetrate. If anything people use it in defense of uncritically accepting transpeople as the next civil rights cause when it seems to be the best argument for a mental illness definition of trans-identification.

I personally think this is incoherent but it manifestly seems to not bother others.

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