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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.
The fact that women are physically weaker and hence more vulnerable than men (and don't give me some nonsense about how this disparity is only visible at the extremes: the average man is stronger than 99% of women) is why protecting women from rape is a higher priority for me than protecting men. Accuse me of being flippant or cheeky if you must, but this really is an instance of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need": we have a special responsibility to protect those most vulnerable to harm. Women being violently raped is seen as an especially heinous crime for much the same reason that children being violently raped is, or elderly people, or physically disabled people: because these groups are uniquely vulnerable and poorly equipped to defend themselves.
ChickenOverlord seemed to be saying a much less anodyne thing - that even if, in fact, a lot more MTF prisoners get raped than bio-female ones, protecting the cis women is always, axiomatically, a higher priority. This is quite different from the heuristic you describe, which breaks down in a context where (a specific subcategory of) men are, for whatever reason, at an elevated risk of rape too. If we afford free women special protection out in the world because they're especially likely to be raped, we should afford MTF convicts special protection in prison because they are especially likely to be raped.
Well, that's the question isn't it – are they?
And as I've argued repeatedly over the last few days, how do you propose to distinguish between the legitimately dysphoric who've been cross-dressing for as long as they've been able to dress themselves (whom, naïvely, I would expect to have a particularly tough time in prison), and the opportunists who only "discovered" they were trans post-conviction? Because, to be frank, I don't think "Isla" Bryson would face an elevated risk of sexual assault in prison compared to the modal prisoner. (I do think he would be unusually likely to commit a sexual assault on another prisoner, whether male or female, but that's neither here nor there.)
I don't propose to do any such thing; I'm just choosing the lesser evil. There are some male rapists who will take the reputation hit of crossdressing to get to the pussy, but I would be surprised if it were so prevalent that the number of male-on-female rapes caused by such a policy would exceed the number of male-on-effeminate-male rapes it would prevent.
(If you're still unconvinced, it would already be a start to limit the policy to medically-transitioning MTFs; I would be really surprised if there were statistically significant numbers of male rapists willing to castrate themselves just to get to the female block. Or, of course, there's Celestial's notion of a trans-only block. There would still be a risk of opportunist male rapists declaring themselves trans to go there rather than men's prison, and then raping the legitimate MTFs - but I think the MTFs themselves, if asked, would rather take that chance than the much higher probability of such rapes if they all had to go to men's prisons; don't you?)
Not necessarily. As I argued the other day, supposing you have a trans-identified male who's been convicted of a non-violent offense and is housed in a minimum-security prison with other non-violent offenders. One morning, the warden announces that all trans-identifying inmates are to be transferred to a special facility just for them. This facility, per the terms of your and @Celestial-body-NOS's thought experiment, will not distinguish between the legitimately dysphoric and the opportunists, nor will it distinguish violent from non-violent offenders. Among others, it will include the aforementioned Sophie (née Daniel) Eastwood, already convicted for murdering a fellow inmate; and assorted inmates convicted for raping men. I imagine a legitimately dysphoric non-violent offender might react to the announcement that he is to be transferred to this facility with more than a little alarm.
By lumping all trans-identifying inmates together (regardless of how long they have identified as trans or what they were convicted for), I find it entirely credible that this proposed policy might result in an increase in the rate at which trans-identifying inmates are assaulted, raped or murdered. Especially the legitimately dysphoric inmates we are particularly committed to protecting.
Well, certainly I don't think violent and non-violent offenders should be less segregated than they are in normal prison. That seems to be an odd epicycle to the thought experiment; is the notion that the budget requirements for both a non-violent-offenders trans wing and a violent-offenders trans wing would be a bridge too far? That seems… strange when we're already entertaining the expense of the trans prison at all.
I didn't set the terms of the thought experiment. @Celestial-body-NOS did: take it up with
himthem because their sex is a private matter between them and the Almighty, and no one is entitled to know it without their explicit say-so!I reiterate that I think my preferred proposal is vastly superior for any metric you care to mention:
You might recognise this system as the system which most Western countries already use. Every proposed alternative (transferring trans-identified males to the female estate, or constructing a special facility just for trans-identified males regardless of whether they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria or not) just seem obviously worse to me than the above: the former because it needlessly endangers female prisoners, the latter because it needlessly endangers non-violent offenders by speciously lumping them in with violent offenders on the basis of an unfalsifiable identity characteristic they purportedly share.
I will admit that, in many cases, placing a prisoner "on protection" entails keeping them in their cell for almost the entire day. On the one hand, this does generally accomplish the stated goal of preventing them from being assaulted or murdered by their fellow inmates; on the other hand, it's functionally equivalent to solitary confinement. What we'd ideally want is some kind of special facility or wing within a prison in which all protection prisoners could be sequestered, but still be able to move about and interact with each other with a comparable degree of freedom as they would expect in general population, but with a reasonable expectation that they would not be violently victimised. Of course, such a facility or wing would immediately become the place that every prisoner would want to serve the entirety of their sentence in, and we'd end up right back where we started. For this solution to be effective, there would have to be some gatekeeping and discretion on the part of the prison governor to distinguish the legitimately endangered from the malingerers. Simply admitting everyone who claims to identify as a woman (or gay, or suffer from a physical disability etc.) is not a workable solution. It is not just ripe for abuse: it is practically designed to be abused. It makes a mockery of the prison system.
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