Priorities
Josh Jackman at Pink News is outraged by the Daily Mail’s reporting on a prison rape.
The Mail is under fire after coverage of a transgender rapist.
(Note that very typical passive locution – “under fire” – without saying by whom. Could just mean by the author, but leaves the impression that the fire is general. Very sleazy.)
What happened was that a convicted rapist made unwanted sexual advances on fellow prisoners.
What the Mail Online did was mention her deadname, call her “a father,” and implied that her actions were down to the fact she has a penis.
Or to put it much less evasively than Josh Jackman does – a convicted rapist was housed with women prisoners and – unsurprisingly – he tried to rape them.
And Josh Jackman is outraged because the Mail used his “deadname” and…implied that rape is connected to having a penis. Yeah that’s the problem here.
The Mail states: “Transgender rapist who was moved to women-only jail despite still having a penis is segregated”.
Trans activists raised issues with the piece, suggesting it was attempting to link the convicted prisoner’s crimes to their gender identity – leaning on the irrational belief that transgender people are actually lying to gain some sort of benefit.
What trans activists? Where? Was this in Josh Jackman’s kitchen, or what?
But more to the point – yes, rape is “linked” to being male. The victims were women, and the rapist has a penis. Those three facts are indeed connected. Saying that does not in the least depend on any “irrational belief that transgender people are actually lying to gain some sort of benefit.”
The real problem is that a convicted rapist was moved to a woman’s prison, after being convicted of raping women. Great. Give the individual (regardless of gender identity) access to fresh victims! That is trans-rights gone mad.
But it fits with current trans-activism. The rights of (cis-)women (I put it in quotes because many of us just call ourselves women, and we should be allowed to do that) must take backseat to the rights of trans-women. In fact, don’t get in the backseat, women, get out of the damn car entirely. You can lay down in front of it while we run over you, okay? You won’t mind that, right? If you do mind that, you must be a TERF.
And then there’s the whole issue of crime statistics getting skewed. It’s a gift to MRAs.
This sort of attempted suppression of Thought Crime is just so fractally gobsmackingly bollocks, it kills me that anybody goes along with it. How dare anyone mention a person’s former name (the name he was convicted under, presumably)! How dare anyone call a person whose insemination of a female person resulted in a child a “father”? How dare anyone even consider the possibility that men might transition in order to be housed in a womens’ prison (less dangerous AND gives them access to women!)
Especially since it’s laughably easy to separate the possibility that some men in prison transition in order to be housed in a women’s prison from any suggestion that trans people in general are faking it. The two are not the same claim, are not connected, do not entail each other. In fact that’s true of any particular trans person.
Christ! First it was fake news, now fake trans*; is nothing real anymore?
I recall seeing many on-line conversations (read; one-way screaming bouts) regarding the possibility of (usually) men feigning transgender identities in order to gain easier access to women, but the people voicing such concerns were shouted down as transphobic and that it would never happen and how dare anybody suggest such a thing. Oddly, the only justification for claiming that such a situation would not happen that I ever saw was that it’d never happened before!
Now that it has happened, the activists’ concerns are about how the media is misrepresenting the rapist. Wow. Just…..wow!
*meaning those such as the one in this article whose transitions have an ulterior motive.
No background yet on how ‘trans’ the accused is, or what his hormonal or anatomical status might be.
Still this is the extreme example that ‘activists’ have refused to think about. And that rabid transphobes have had to invent up to now.
John, one doesn’t have to be a raving transphobe to have considered the possibility, even if doing so got one labelled as such.
This isn’t new. I wish it were. No-one has needed to invent scenarios incorporating such behaviour for years. There are far, far too many examples of it actually happening.
Check out ‘This never happens’ on Facebook.
Well, that couldn’t have been predicted, could it? It’s not as though “cis” women (yep, hate that word too, not least because it’s imposed from the outside) haven’t expressed worries about this since the possibility was raised.
But apparently when you’re trans and taking T-blockers the magic hormone fairies remove any kind of sexually aggressive impulses.
Those among us who despise the ‘cis’ prefix should simply stop using it, even in scare quotes. It’s unnecessary at best and demeaning at worse. For the vast majority of people our sex wasn’t assigned at birth, it was determined in the womb (of a woman, no less), and there is no need or reason to suddenly be adding a prefix as though we were just another sub-set.
Pink News is now deciding whether or not to disable comments on trans stories entirely.