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Notes -
Just how far does agreeing to respect someone's identity go? Let me introduce you to a strange case that I read about over the weekend, of a Jewish woman named Daryln Madden. Darlyn is much more violent than the typical woman, having murdered at least three people, with the most recently discovered one being the horrifying cold case of Bill Newton:
Now, if dismembering gay porn stars doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that you typically expect Jewish ladies in Southern California to get up to, there's certainly a good reason for that, and you've probably already guessed the explanation - Daralyn was Darrell at the time that "she" was gruesomely butchering men for fun and profit. Here's where things get weirder though:
...
Indeed.
So, which of Ms. Madden's identities are to be respected? Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop? Well, if a man can become a woman, surely a Nazi can become a Jew, I suppose. Still, even by the standards of trans-in-prison debates, the level of cynicism or true belief (there can't be any in between, right?) to acknowledge Ms. Madden as an authentic Jewish woman boggles the mind. Point deer, make horse.
If an institution gives preferential treatment to individuals based entirely on their identity, it’s absolutely understandable why someone would fake it if all it takes is self-declaration.
It’s completely the prison’s own fault if Nazi inmates are pretending to be Jewish so that they don’t eat the standard prison slop, and I have little sympathy for the abusive, violent institution that is the US justice system. If they wanted to “fix” the problem, they should make the kosher food as unpalatable and inconvenient as the rest of their offerings, not test inmates for Judaism.
Personally, my preferred solution would be to limit or remove the circumstances where individual identity matters at all. For instance, my preferred solution to the pronoun issue would just be to remove gendered pronouns completely; in languages like Hungarian or Turkish for example, they don’t exist and people communicate just fine, while romance languages go further than English and have almost every single noun and adjective be gendered. Obviously this is not always practical but the general goal should be towards less identity politics, not more.
No, it's the court cases taken to force the prison system to cater to such extremes instead of being allowed to judge on a case-by-case basis of "Okay, Shlomo here really is Jewish but Darrell is just taking the piss".
Remember our dear friend Demi Minor, the 'woman' who got two women pregnant when transferred to a women's prison? In compliance with the law suit taken by the ACLU New Jersey (who are all about that decarceration) to force the New Jersey Department of Corrections to allow self-identified trans people to be jailed in the 'appropriate' prison:
Funnily enough, Tess and ACLU NJ had nothing to say when contacted about the Demi Minor case. Odd, that.
There's not much a prison governor can do even if they think "this is damn stupid" when informed "yeah well the judge ruled we gotta do this, oh yeah and make sure the wardens use 'Mx' when addressing the violent drug addict rapist murderer, you have to respect their feminine dignity".
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