That appropriately balances the rights
Fair Play for Women on the fad for putting a few men in women’s prisons:
In July 2019 a specialist unit was opened on the Downview women’s prison estate to house high-risk transgender prisoners. We obtained the Equality Impact assessment through a Freedom of Information Request. The document is now available to view here: Equality Analysis Document E Wing Version 16.0 for publication.
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‘E-wing’ was the solution to a problem of where to accommodate high-risk male prisoners who have acquired a GRC and so need to be treated as “female for all purposes”. Some of these prisoners are dangerous sex offenders who under normal circumstance would be considered too high-risk to mix with women. But the MOJ decided that their GRC meant they had to be treated differently from the trans prisoners without a GRC.
In other words the MOJ decided that their GRC mattered more than the safety of female prisoners. That’s a deeply weird thing to decide.
An operational need to find a long-term solution that appropriately balances the rights of men who say they are women and the rights and safety of the female prisoners. Just look at that. Women have to compromise on their rights and safety because a small subset of men says it Identifies As women. Real women have to give up their rights and safety because some men are pretending to be women.
They might as well just give up altogether. They might as well just say women have to “appropriately balance” their rights with the rights of violent abusive men at home and at work and on the street and everywhere else because the violent abusive men say so.
It is then confirmed on page 5 that the MOJ considers trans prisoners are “required to be located in the women’s estate because they hold a GRC”. No acknowledgement of the single-sex exemptions that enable males to be excluded from female-only spaces, even if they do have a GRC.
“Given the need to advance equality and eliminate discrimination” – against men who say they are women, that is. Plain ordinary boring actual women, the ones who just are women, don’t matter. There’s no need to advance their equality or eliminate discrimination against them. They have been moved to the class “Karens” for ease of forgetting. The only women who matter now are the male ones.
I wonder whether any female prison officers, doctors etc have the right to refuse to search/examine the male prisoners?
Are you suggesting they commit real violence? I imagine the prisoner would immediately feel bad!
I must be reading this wrong. It seems to me like they’re proposing to create a special wing, within a women’s prison, which will house only men, who they will call women. The only “other women” in prison with them, in their wing, will be other “women.”
It would be interesting to see how many of those in E-Wing considered their fellow inmates to be women for the purposes of preying on them. Would those that were being looked over for abuse be inclined to complain that they were not being validated “as women” in the same way that they complain about lesbians who don’t like penises?
Papito – I think the bit about “will ensure that they are provided with maximum regime whilst ensuring other women are safeguarded from harm” is the key. In context “regime” seems to be code for socializing aka leaving one’s cell for shared areas.
Ophelia, #5: That’s true, but as a rule each prison wing has its own communal area within itself, and high-security wings also either have their own outdoor exercise area or if that isn’t possible are allowed outside at different times from the general population, so E-wing prisoners will only associate with other E-wing prisoners.
As such, that’s the good bit about the story. What isn’t so good is that those men with GRCs who are not considered a high-risk threat to women will continue to be treated as women and housed with the general, all-female population. It also isn’t clear on whether self-ID without a GRC qualifies a man to be sent to a women’s prison.
I wonder if trans-identifying women are routinely sent to men’s prisons? One would think that, with or without a GRC, a TiW who has not surgically transitioned will be uniquely vulnerable in a men’s prison – in fact, probably the one group from among the identity crowd that really could be called the ‘most oppressed’ in that context.
I can’t help but feel that as sex-offenders are generally second only to those who harm children in being the targets of violence in prisons the E-wing was designed more for the safety of the men as for the women, whose safety was likely an afterthought being used as the main reason. I’d bet the men’s prisons aren’t being so solicitous in protecting their female-as-male prisoners.
Also, this may just be my cynicism talking, but I think that if the E-wing becomes the standard in the future a lot of TiMs on sex-offence charges, and whether GRC holders or not, will suddenly undergo periods of clarity and realise they were men all along if they know that going to a women’s prison will not give them access to the women in there.
AoS, but if E-wing prisoners will be trans women and will socialize only with other E-wing prisoners, it’s confusing that the assessment talks about balancing rights. If it’s a separate wing, and it’s for trans women only, then they won’t be a threat to women, right? Or am I just lost in the weeds?
I may be lost on the other side of the weed patch, but it looks to me like they are distinguishing between two groups – transwomen with a GRC on the one hand, and actual women plus transwomen without GRCs on the other? Or do they mean transmen? I can’t tell because of the use of “other female prisoners (trans and non-trans)” and then “other women, both trans and non-trans)”. Without getting started on the phrase “non-trans”, are they saying that if a man has gone to the trouble of getting a GRC, he will be kept separate from women in prison, but if he just casually identifies as a woman – maybe right after being sentenced to prison – he will be housed with women?
(I just noticed that while my tablet still does not recognise “etc” as a real thing, it insists on adding a space between “trans” and “man” or “woman”)
It seems to me that you could make a separate wing for them in the men’s estate, but go ahead and call them “trans with GRCs.” I don’t see any reason to put them anywhere near actual women.
The proposal requires identifying just which GRC’d males ARE a threat, and actually counting them. I suspect those in power will reject any such attempt. We can’t let hard numbers spoil our myths. There’s a sort of analogy to creating a separate ‘trans-women’ category in sporting competitions. Which won’t happen either.