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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Given how many men object to the slightest hint of femininity in a natal-anatomy!man, I suspect that they would.

I wouldn't expect men who "discovered" their trans identity immediately prior to being convicted of a violent crime to display any hints of femininity at all. Because they're not men who have been struggling with their gender identity from a very young age, but rather ordinary violent men taking advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.

I can imagine a man who has been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria and has been cross-dressing from a very young age might have a hard time in a men's prison. I have a hard time imagining that e.g. "Isla" Bryson would face an elevated risk of victimisation in a men's prison compared to the modal prisoner. Because he is a vicious, remorseless thug whose solicitor presumably advised him to take advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.

No, I understand that it is possible that a cis-man might falsely claim to be trans in order to be moved to the trans-women's section; I merely consider this a less bad outcome than abandoning actual trans-women to the ghastly fate to which your proposed policy would lead.

The fact that every policy implies trade-offs does not imply that all policies are created equal. A policy which is dramatically more likely to be abused by bad actors than to be used by those who legitimately need it is a bad policy on its face. The fact that doctors are allowed to administer morphine inevitably means that some drug addicts will be administered morphine who don't really need it – but a doctor who administers morphine to every patient who requests it, no questions asked, would quickly find the ratio of drug-seeking patients to the legitimately needy becoming unacceptably large. One of the many skills a doctor must learn is distinguishing the legitimately sick from the malingerers: a doctor who failed to learn this skill would be struck off, or ought to.

Your policy would not even accomplish its own stated aims: it does not even optimise for protecting the most vulnerable prisoners. It optimises, as I said, for protecting the prisoners willing to make unfalsifiable claims about their inner psychological states, with no gatekeeping of any kind. I simply don't understand your unquestioned belief that legitimately dysphoric prisoners would be safer if housed in a facility containing every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so immediately prior to or after conviction. If you were a young man who'd been struggling with his gender identity for as long as you can remember and had partly medically transitioned, who would you rather share a cell with: a cisgender man who'd been convicted of tax evasion and who has never hurt a fly, or a vicious violent thug like "Isla" Bryson? I know how I'd pick.

I really do not how you arrived at your conclusion that the best way to protect legitimately dysphoric prisoners is to house them in a facility with every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so very recently, even if they're violent offenders, even if they've been convicted of raping male victims. I genuinely don't know why you're patting yourself on the back about how compassionate your proposed policy is when to my mind it seems obviously worse at your stated aim of protecting female-presenting male prisoners, when compared to offering "focused protection" of the most vulnerable prisoners on a case-by-case basis.