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That is not an accurate representation of my views. A separate facility for trans-women was an offer of a compromise, and I do not appreciate the repeated assertions that agreement with the 'gender-critical' position, or whatever you call your side of the argument, is a prerequisite for being considered 'mature' or 'sensible'.
So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?
As an aside, don't you find it the least bit interesting that, for all your talk about the necessity of housing trans-identified males outside of the male estate in order to protect them from the "ghastly fate" that would otherwise befall them, trans activists cannot dredge up even one example of a trans-identified male being murdered in a British prison in the last twenty-five years?
I'll be more than happy to stop, if you'll stop implying that I'm a pervert for disagreeing with gender ideology. A simple trade.
Transgender women could be housed with the female population only if they’ve had bottom surgery, otherwise they go into protective custody in the male wing. I believe that’s the law in many countries right now including the UK, and it seems quite reasonable to me. What would your objections be to that?
The fact that male people are so much stronger and more aggressive than female people, even after undergoing bottom surgery.
Sucks for someone like me who got beaten at arm wrestling by mildly athletic women even before transitioning, had female range grip strength even back then, and never tried to hit or slapped someone, like even when getting sexually assaulted I just froze and waited for it to be over. It doesn’t feel great to hear I don’t deserve being protected from rape because of the way I was born.
But on the hand, I recognise that I won enough at the birth lottery being middle class in a wealthy European country in the 21st century and that this is just me feeling slightly down at hypothetical scenarios that I am exceedingly unlikely to face.
You do deserve to be protected from rape, just as everyone does. But even though protecting trans-identified male inmates from rape and assault is a valid and noble goal, I think housing male inmates in the female estate is a bridge too far, and would be unlikely to pass a cost-benefit analysis. In the hypothetical scenario in which you were sent to prison for a non-violent offense, I would hope that you would be housed in a minimum security prison along with other non-violent offenders. I would also hope that the prison warden/governor would recognise that, owing to your appearance and anatomy, you are especially vulnerable to being violently victimised, and take proactive measures to prevent that outcome (such as placing you on protection if necessary).
I don't think it's really fair for you to equivocate between "if sent to prison, I don't think you should be housed in the female estate" with "you don't deserve to be protected from rape". I'm sure you don't think a slim, petite cis gay man (that is, a twink) who gets sent to prison ought to be housed in the female estate, but I doubt you'd appreciate it if I summarised that opinion as "twinks don't deserve to be protected from rape in prison".
Sure but the female estate is greater protection without the needing to be on constant protection, which is generally considered a punishment. Otherwise why have female prisons at all, just put all of them in the same building and have the women confined to their cells 23h a day.
A petite cis gay man doesn’t have a female body that’s going to attract the same kind of attention as a passing post-op trans woman in a male estate. The risk for the latter is equivalent to a cis woman in the same situation, maybe with greater violence depending on the inmates attitudes or the belief that they can “get away” with more since a trans woman will attract less sympathy.
So I do feel sad that in your worldview, I don’t deserve the full extent of protection from rape and violence some other people do, because I wasn’t born the right kind of human. I hope I never get in trouble with the law or falsely accused of a violent crime, abused by a partner and need a DV shelter, become homeless, etc, and that I can maintain my nice comfortable middle-class existence.
Or… I can live in a country that has laws that I consider reasonable (and it does seem that most western countries consider bottom surgery sufficient for most of the above - even the Reform Party justice minister spoke in favour of not automatically housing trans women in male wings), surround myself with people for whom being trans isn’t a big deal (which is honestly a much bigger number than I thought), and just live my life with a bit less stress.
If the UK is making housing trans-identified males in the female estate conditional on their having undergone bottom surgery, that's news to me.
Yes, but as I pointed out, in your worldview, some people deserve greater protection from rape and violence than others, because they weren't born the right kind of human.
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One inmate per cell, all interactions between inmates supervised by guards sufficiently numerous to intervene in the event of violence of harassment having the potential thereof.
'Trans-woman murdered' isn't the only bad outcome we are trying to avoid; there is also 'trans-woman beaten up by low-life with extremely retrograde Views on gender roles as a warning to anyone else assigned-male-at-birth who might be thinking about getting in touch with their feminine side'.
I do not believe that you, personally, are motivated by sexual desire in your opposition to trans-inclusivity. That does not change the fact that other people's organs are none of your business, even when your interest in them is not sexually motivated. This is especially the case for the sexual organs, including the gamete-producing organs. If someone starts digging through your medical records willy-nilly, should the Data Protection Act only apply if they are touching themself?
I'm curious if you have any statistics on how many times this has happened in British prisons, and hence if your proposed dedicated prison for trans-identified men is a solution in search of a problem.
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Oh, I see: you're doing that thing certain people do where, when asked what your preferred policy solution would be, you describe some impossible utopia that will never and can never exist – then when people point this out to you, you accuse them of being moral mutants.
As always, this is a tremendously useful contribution to the discussion and not a complete and utter waste of everyone's time. That's the hallmark of a truly ethical person: someone who spends all their time daydreaming about hypothetical solutions that will never come to pass, while rubbishing the pragmatic alternatives offered by the more grounded and down-to-earth.
Seriously, dude: this is about as productive a contribution to the discussion as announcing "when I'm in charge we won't need prisons, because everyone will get along with each other!"
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Fine, no détente. If you continue to insist that my opposition to gender ideology is rooted in some kind of voyeuristic desire to know the genital configuration of everyone in my vicinity (despite how strenuously I've made it clear that I think it's tremendously inappropriate for trans-identified males to volunteer this information unprompted) – I will continue to insist that, if you really mean what you say, you are painfully naïve.
I do not insist that your inquiry is voyeuristic in nature. My point is that, even though it is not born out of sexual perversion, it is still not any of your business.
I also acknowledge that you have stated that your concern is not with penis/vulva but with testicles/ovaries. (Does this mean that you would consider someone born with a penis and two viable-egg-producing ovaries to be female, and someone born with a vulva and two viable-sperm-producing testicules to be male? What about someone born with one testicule and one ovary, each producing viable gametes of its associated size?) I disagree with your claim that either of them is something which you are entitled to be told by someone who would prefer to keep to themself.
Why is that trans activists' attempts at "gotchas" always reside solely in the realm of the hypothetical?
I continue to insist that asserting that one's sex ought to be kept "private" is a meaningless demand when, in 99% of cases, it can be reliably inferred at a glance. It makes about as much sense as demanding that one's height, eye colour or need to use a wheelchair be kept "private". It's a doubly meaningless demand in this debate given how many trans people will openly announce "I am a trans [woman]/[man]", and the terms "trans woman" and "trans man" are literally defined in terms which are derivative of sex: by disclosing that you are a trans woman, you have therefore disclosed that you are a person of the male sex (and vice versa for trans men). A "trans woman" is "a person of the male sex who identifies as a woman"; let's see what happens when we taboo our words:
Do you see how absurd this is, and how contrived it sounds post-tabooing?
Firstable, that question was not an attempt at a 'gotcha', so much as a request for clarification of your particular definition of 'sex'.
Secondable, it is not necessarily hypothetical; any chirurgeon will tell you that human organs never look like the diagrams in medical textbooks: there are always variations, and sometimes they can both be very weird and go unnoticed until the body is scanned or opened up for some other reason. I have even heard of men who were born with all the visible male parts, never considered that they were anything other than men, fathered children, and then went to hospital for some procedure and found out that they had been carrying around uteruses for seventy years!
Thirdable, I believe that the Rightful Caliph has written a defence of the use of hypotheticals in argument.
א, cis individuals outnumber trans individuals by such a degree that, given a sample drawn from the population at large, one can get past 90% just with their gender identity.
ב, Do I need to tap the sign?
I am not claiming that biological sex be kept private at all times; I am saying that the choice should be left to the individual. If Alice wants to declare her transness to everyone, Betty wants to keep it a closely guarded secret, and Carol wants to tell her friends and the readers of her blog but not strangers in the shops when she wants to empty her bladder, their decisions should all be respected.
Returning to the analogy with other forms of medical confidentiality, if Daniel wants to post his entire medical history on his website for everyone and their brother to peruse, he is welcome to do so; other people are disallowed from making that decision for him.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean.
Some concrete examples or citations would be appreciated. The sex-is-a-spectrum people routinely claim such edge cases exist and then are unable to dredge up even a Weekly World News article.
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That sounds like a massive expense for a rather small percentage of the population. Prisons generally try to operate on economies of scale, it's a lot cheaper to manage prisoners if you can cram as many as possible into the smallest area you can (without getting complaints from the human rights crowd). It's akin to making a separate third restroom for trannies when you could just have them use the one that matches their sex (bathrooms are, after all, sex separated, and I've been repeatedly told that conflating sex and gender is transphobic).
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din
List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within
They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.
"It's not a compromise with sin; we're just reducing expenses at the cost of throwing a rather small percentage of the population under the bus."
"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"
What an amusing topic to invoke the concept of "sin" under. Beautiful, really.
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Pleading to the Gods of the Copybook Headings in support of housing transgender offenders in women's prisons is a ludicrous move. What do you think sin is?
I favour Granny Weatherwax's definition.
I am curious how you arrived at the conclusion that sex-segregation is the best way to protect female inmates from harm amounts to "treating people as things". I legitimately do not see how the one follows from the other.
Your tic of defending your worldview in an indirect way by linking to other authors (and not even including the relevant passage in the body of your comment), many of whom were writing fiction and not discussing the object-level topic under discussion, is very telling. It makes me think you lack confidence in your own arguments to persuade people, and that your goal is not to persuade but to distract and frustrate.
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"If I claim it's throwing the trans population under the bus then that means it's actually throwing them under the bus." You're assuming a shared moral framework here that very much does not exist. A trans woman is a man pretending to be a woman, or a man who has a mental illness causing him to think he is a woman. Someone who has a mental illness causing them to think they are Napoleon isn't thrown under the bus when I refuse to use taxpayer money to help them invade Russia.
Now that's an analogy I've not heard in a long time.
Scott's article was bad and he should feel bad.
The link seems dead.
Thanks, I've replaced it with an archive link.
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Eh, I've been using that argument since 2010 or so, it's still as applicable now as it was then.
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He is, however, arguably thrown under the bus if you insist on locking him in a facility with a population whose notorious Napoleon fetish causes them to brutally rape any transnapoleonics they can get their hands on, which is what I think Celestial meant. (Of course, this line of reasoning could imply that effeminate gay men shouldn't be jailed with regular male inmates, regardless of their gender identification.)
If he doesn't want to get thrown in the Napoleon-rape cage then all he has to do is not commit crime and/or invade Russia.
This amounts to an argument that it's good, actually, that they're getting thrown under the bus. We're quite a ways away from "they aren't being thrown under the bus, they're no more oppressed than any other men".
No, I just see preventing prison rape for mtf trannies as no higher of a priority than preventing it for non-trans male prisoners. It's something we should work to reduce, but frankly I don't see many practical ways to accomplish it, especially not without using resources that could be better spent elsewhere. I place a much higher priority on preventing the rape of biological women in prisons, and keeping mtf tranny criminals far the fuck away from them seems like one of the most practical and inexpensive ways to reduce that.
I think we may have identified a crux: I actually agree with you that protecting MTFs from prison rape shouldn't be higher-priority than preventing it for regular men - but I don't agree that protecting cis women from rape is inherently higher-priority than protecting men from it. I think the rape of a man is as much of a tragedy and a moral outrage as the rape of a woman, women just tend to be more vulnerable to rape in the general population and thus get the bulk of the attention. So, insofar as I'm trying to decrease the number of overall rapes among prisoners, instead of valuing the rape of female prisoners 'higher', your way of thinking seems to trade a possibility that a trans inmate could rape female prisoners against a near-certainty that the trans inmate will themself be raped by male prisoners - which looks like a very bad deal, utilitarianistically.
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Having prisons in the first place.
Fines, Beatings, Exile and Death should be all the forms of punishment a civilized society dispenses.
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The method by which we enjoy what prosperity remains despite absolute values-incoherence.
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