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Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion. It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian.
I don't think they are. I think they're primarily thinking about the main culture war flashpoints, almost all of which involve male people in women's spaces.
I agree that they aren't salient. My argument is that they should be. My argument is that it's incoherent to claim to oppose violence against women and yet support policies that put women at greater risk of physical harm for the benefit of men.
I don't see it as particularly more incoherent than when right-wingers, who are generally hardly known for wanting to improve the lot of imprisoned criminals, develop a strange and very isolated compassion towards women prisoners who are forced to share their prison tracts with men.
It would be easier to make sense of the sentiment if it were presented as outrage at the MtF criminals getting off lightly/getting to enjoy a fox-in-the-chicken-coop scenario, rather than the appropriation of care foundation language we are getting. (Something about using the master's tools on the master's house?)
There's nothing incoherent about thinking the punishment should fit the crime. When a woman commits a crime, her punishment is to be sent to prison. Her punishment is not to be penetratively raped (and possibly impregnated) by one of her fellow inmates.
How does prison rape happen? Presumably if you can forcefully penetrate your fellow inmates and get away with it, you can also do all sorts of other violence to them. Anecdotally, this happens a lot, including in single-sex prisons. Is that part of the "fitting" punishment? What about male-on-male prison rape? I have never heard anyone on the right take up a crusade to reduce those things, and surely, in the age of robotics, tasers and $50 HD CCTV we could easily shut down all physical forms of prisoner-on-prisoner violence in no time if a critical mass of people didn't think it's all part of the punishment.
It's a bit too convenient if of all unscheduled tribulations of prison, the only one that you think urgently needs to be addressed happens to be one where the indicated solution would be to grant you a symbolic victory on a culture war topic that otherwise has nothing to do with prisons.
For deep-seated reasons rooted in evolutionary psychology, almost everyone feels an intrinsic protectiveness towards women, even in cases where the woman in question has broken the law. Most people feel more horrified when hearing about a woman being penetratively raped than they do when hearing about a man being penetratively raped. This is probably related to the fact that female people can be impregnated against their will, and are systematically weaker and less able to defend themselves than male people are.
You don't need to agree with this, or think it's fair or logical, to understand the instinctual reaction. I think "instinctual horror against women being mistreated" has a great deal more explanatory power than immediately jumping to the conclusion that conservative opposition to trans women in female prisons has nothing to do with a desire to protect female inmates, and is solely rooted in hatred of trans people.
Do you assume women's prisons are meaningfully less violent than men's prisons? After having seen an assortment bodycam videos of female criminals getting arrested, I would find that doubtful. Were you aware of headlines such as this?
None of this other mistreatment seems to trigger the same instinctual reaction in right-wingers, at least not to the extent that I have even once seen them bring it up. All I am asking is that you apply the same standard that, in your opening post, you wanted to be applied to the "woke coalition": that if they visibly care about and campaign against one instance of a bad thing but are apparently indifferent to another which is so adjacent that you couldn't possibly miss it if you looked at the former, this is prima facie evidence that their true principles entail approval of the latter regardless of what their stated principles say.
I don't even think you are wrong, in your diagnosis of the "woke coalition". It's just that you earn no points for recognising that your outgroup is hypocritical and unprincipled. Do not even the 'publicans the same?
I don't assume, I know:
Given that your article is from the UK, it won't surprise you to learn that the story is much the same over there as far as homicides go. It appears that not a single woman or trans person has been murdered in prison since at least 2015. If per capita homicide rates between the male and female estate were identical, you would expect two women murdered in the period.
Interesting that the UK is one country in which male inmates have been housed in the female estate, this is a recent phenomenon, this article comments on a huge spike in violence in the female estate, and yet doesn't mention the sexes of any of the perpetrators of this violence. I'm not saying that this spike is entirely attributable to the relatively new presence of male inmates in the female estate, but it sure is interesting that the source you provided specifically comments on the fact that the current rate of violence in the female estate is
As I said previously, I think a great many people have an instinctive reaction of horror and outrage when they learn about a male person assaulting a female person, and this reaction isn't triggered when they hear about a male person assaulting a male person or a female person assaulting a female person. We can debate whether that's fair, appropriate or logical until the cows come home, but I think that instinctive reaction has a great deal more explanatory power in why conservatives might object to male people in women's prisons or contact sports than the pat answer of "they hate trans people and want to make their lives difficult out of sheer bloody-mindedness".
What standard am I failing to apply? I am strongly opposed to violence against women, as a consequence I've donated literally thousands of euros to my local rape crisis centre and am strongly opposed to male inmates being housed in the female estate. I don't feel any kind of inconsistency.
There are actually official statistics, suggesting a grand total of 43? 48? MtF prisoners as of two years ago. They would have to be very prolific indeed to be a significant cause of this uptick.
Talking about murders rather shifts the goalposts.
Well, now we are getting narrower. Presumably there is also no instinctive horror about women getting harmed by black mold and feces-smeared walls. So the principle isn't really "protect women" but "protect women from direct assault by men"? At that point, how can you fault wokes if their principle isn't "protect women" but "protect women from direct assault by people who have systemic power over them"?
If you cared for women in prisons being submitted to punishment beyond the fact of being imprisoned, you could campaign for improving conditions or donate to charities that aim to do so. The article mentions several such charities in the UK; I imagine similar ones also exist in the US. I didn't dispute that you (or right-wingers in general) care for women out of prison, so the rape crisis centre thing is irrelevant. My point is that you don't seem to care if inmates, male or female, get beaten, mentally abused, or slowly poisoned by mycotoxins; in fact I am fairly sure that I have seen stories of abuse of female prisoners by male guards (and quite adjacently, Youtube is full of videos of violent arrests of female criminals by police), to which the right-wing reaction is also reliably crickets. At some point, you will have to retreat to asserting that in fact the natural horrified reaction of the great many is confined to the possibility of MtF trans violating women, which surely would be no less facile than saying that Oct 7 naturally doesn't count.
According to the Guardian, there were 97 sexual assaults in the female estate between 2016-19, of which 7 were committed by transgender inmates. At the time there were 3,795 people housed in the female estate, of whom 34 were transgender. In other words, a transgender inmate is more than ten times more likely to sexually assault a fellow inmate than a cisgender female inmate. In light of this (and the fact that transgender inmates are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned for violent offenses, including sexual offenses) and given there are only six women's prisons in the UK, I don't find the idea that the newfound presence of male people in the female estate could be a significant contributing factor to the recent spike in prison violence in the female estate.
Why? Homicide rate is usually considered a robust metric in determining how violent a country or region is. "Assault" is a heterogenous category which includes everything from a savage beating which renders the victim paraplegic to a rough shove on the shoulder.
Because if that was the principle on which they were operating, presumably they would be opposed to the presence of male people in female prisons, given that male people have systemic power over female people by virtue of being systematically stronger.
"You need to do more to help the less fortunate than you are currently doing," says a person who (unless I am very much mistaken) is doing even less to help the less fortunate than I am. Isn't it always the way?
On several occasions over the last decade I've volunteered to perform music for church services at two of the men's prisons in my county. That may not sound like much, but I'm quite confident it's a damn sight more than the average person has done to improve the wellbeing of male inmates. So in point of fact I rather resent you deciding on my behalf whose welfare I do and don't care for.
none of which you care to provide, of course. And while I don't dispute that this must happen sometimes, in most Western jurisdictions it's much more difficult to become a correctional officer if you've been convicted of a crime (the US, the UK) — no such restriction applies to male inmates who claim to be trans. If you don't understand why a female inmate would be more concerned about the presence of a male person whom they know for a fact has a history of violent behaviour serious enough to warrant imprisonment vs. a male prison guard who has never been convicted of a crime — then I don't know what to tell you, really.
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