The incorrect assumption
Institutional capture:
Canadian Bar Association Demands “No Exception” To Male Transfers to Women’s prisons
Well, that’s women decisively thrown under the wheels of the runaway locomotive.
The Canadian Bar Association had issued a series of recommendations and directives to the Correctional Service of Canada demanding violent male criminals be accommodated in women’s prisons, and to ensure their biological sex is never recorded.
In a letter dated December 4, 2020 the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) denounced a draft proposal by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) that they claim was not lax enough in its treatment and transfer of trans-identified prisoners. The CSC Commissioner’s Directive currently takes into consideration operative status and any overriding safety concerns for staff and other inmates in the movement of trans-identified inmates, but the CBA claimed those policies were discriminatory.
“In our view, [Commissioner’s Directive 100] is based on the incorrect assumption that people are fundamentally men or women (or intersex) based on biology at birth,” the CBA writes, “we recommend that the policy be based on the assumption that people have the right to be placed in institutions that reflect their gender identity if that is their choice.”
The “incorrect” “assumption” that men are not women. It’s not incorrect and it’s not an assumption. What’s the alternative? That sex is like weight or hair length or muscle definition – changeable by the owner. Nope – that’s what’s incorrect, not the awareness that sex is not changeable by the owner. It’s not “incorrect” to understand that men are not women.
The CBA goes on to suggest that almost no health or safety concerns be taken into consideration in most cases, including in transfers and double-bunking. On page 4 of the letter, the CBA writes that transfers should be made “without exception.”
“We recommend that CSC implement a policy of gender identity placement if that is the preference, without exception. In practice, the application of this exception has led to some trans women being denied placement at women’s prisons based on risk speculation.”
What about the preference of women though? What about the preference of women not to be locked up in prison with men, especially violent men? Why doesn’t that matter? Why is it only trans people whose preferences are sacred?
The CBA is hopelessly captured at this point. The current executive is dominated by people making a living from an ever-expanding field of rights, including at least two criminal lawyers who have happily used a sequence of procedural delays to put trials off until they hit the ‘Jordan rule’ limit. Just today there was a CBC story on a rapist who will now never see trial because of those tactics.
Never did read much of Joanna Williams’ “The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology” though sadly it seems of increasing relevance these days.
But her opening chapter – “Changing attitudes towards sex and gender” – underlines the fact that it is changing and contradictory definitions for both categories that’s one of the major causes of the whole transgender clusterfuck. For which feminists in general share no small portion of the blame.
Half the population seems to think that sex and gender are synonymous while most of the rest more or less accept the more credible, increasingly common, and useful view – endorsed in a recent BMJ editorial – that:
“Sex, unless otherwise specified, relates to biology: the gametes, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. Gender relates to societal roles, behaviours, and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically.”
We can’t hope to resolve that problem if we can’t even agree on what the terms mean.
Since there doesn’t seem to be any science behind these decisions, I wonder how so many institutions like the CBA, or UK police, or what have you, became so enamoured of the transgender movement. Police (for instance) might be generally misogynist, but I would have thought a sexist, macho cop would side with heterosexual women over men in dresses. But no.
And here the CBA is clearly much more concerned with the violence that a convicted TIM will face and not at all with the likely violence that female prisoners will suffer at the hands of the convicted rapist TIM.
Maybe they really do hate women.
It’s becoming clear to me that such misogynists would rather accept that gender identities are biologically determined than accept that males can be feminine and still males. Transgenderism is sexist at its core.
@2 ‘I would have thought a sexist, macho cop would side with heterosexual women over men in dresses.’ I think you just answered your own question. Kate Manne (who, unfortunately and surprisingly given her work, is all-in with gender ideology) coined a useful word, ‘himpathy.’ Or, more crudely, ‘bros before hos’, no matter what the bros happen to be wearing.
And this “no exceptions” policy is exactly right, once we begin with the premise that transwomen are women in the same way black women are women or gay women are women. Anything else is unfair discrimination.
I’m getting more and more frustrated by those who hold my position halfway. Not because I’m an extremist who can’t tolerate dissent, but because they don’t understand what they’re getting into. “Of course transwomen should be considered “women” for most purposes — that’s only right and fair and common respect — but not in situations X, Y, and Z because those situations are critically different in a way I’m going to explain.” And X, Y, and Z could mean women’s sports, prisons, communal showers, or crime statistics and their explanations are always right on point.
BUT— they’ve also missed the point. If a trans woman is a kind of woman, then we have to make our decisions on what’s right, fair, and commonly respectful using arguments which would work just as well with OTHER different kinds of women. “Tall women athletes should play on men’s teams.” “Lesbian women should stay out of communal showers.” “We decide whether Hispanic women belong in men’s prison or women’s prison on a case-by-case basis using risk assessment.”
We can’t do that. It’s pretty much all or nothing: either treat transwomen as if they were effeminate men in dresses — using courtesy and consideration but remembering they’re male when it comes to the law and women’s spaces — or count them as women, case closed, no exceptions. The “halfway” position can only be between TWAW and treating them like abominations and criminals, not between letting them in changing rooms and letting them in women’s prisons.
But when I try to explain this, I feel like a fanatic. “They won’t take less. They won’t compromise. There can no exceptions.”
“Sure they will. Many of them are saying they will. And those reasonable ones — well, I’m more than happy to call them ‘women.’”
If they keep this up, the women’s prisons will be huge and the men’s prisons will be depleted to near-deserted.
In that case I propose a no-exception policy that cis-women (for the sake of argument) be housed in their own prisons.
There should only be women’s prisons or men’s prisons that identify as women’s prisons, problem solved. No need to move any of them. :P
Isn’t the most funamental part of imprisonment the removal of choice? No longer able to choose where to live, what to eat, what to wear, a job, a social network, which wine to pair with which meal?
Why is this one “choice” considered to be sacred and inviolable?
“We can’t do that. It’s pretty much all or nothing: either treat transwomen as if they were effeminate men in dresses — using courtesy and consideration but remembering they’re male when it comes to the law and women’s spaces — or count them as women, case closed, no exceptions. The ‘halfway’ position can only be between TWAW and treating them like abominations and criminals, not between letting them in changing rooms and letting them in women’s prisons.”
I think many people were prepared to go all the way (or much more than half-way) with TWAW. Until everything smashed into a wall called “reality.” (Personally, I’m an agnostic when it comes to “gender.” Maybe there really is a “thing” in our brains that makes us comfortable with the sex of our bodies and trans people don’t have that. I doubt it, but I won’t deny that it’s possible.)
But besides all the intellectually bankrupt drivel that passes for TRActivism and gender studies, there’s the undeniable reality that transwomen were almost all born with penises and that people with penises (Hereafter refered to as “men”) have been and continue to be a genuine threat to women. Certainly a transwoman convicted of rape (sometimes multiple cases of rape) of women is a threat to women.
So they must ALL be treated legally as men and women’s legal rights and protections must be upheld against their unproven claims of their having a misaligned “gender.” But individual rights, and specific trans rights (whatever they might be) that don’t infringe on women’s rights, should be recognized.
Roj Blake,
“removal of choice” – good point. Reminds me of a cartoon of several decades ago about a gaoler in some medieval prison going around to the cells handing out the daily rations. And his apron was labelled, “No substitutions”: what sort of restaurant is this? ;-)
But substituting gender for sex is exactly what is happening in far too many cases. I was absolutely gobsmacked in reading an article in Wikipedia – sadly, another institution that’s been ideologically captured by transdogma – on Olympian Laurel Hubbard and how “she” had, I kid you not, recently “transitioned to female”.
They kind of do a nudge-nudge, wink-wink in alluding to the idiosyncratic use of “female” as a gender – give them an inch (“woman”) and they’ll take a mile (“female”) – in their citations, but “female” as a gender is largely if not entirely incoherent twaddle. About the most that one could get for a meaning out of “female gender” is the gender of females – a useless circular definition – or the personalities, behavioural traits and stereotypes (AKA gender) of, or typical of, adult human females (AKA, “women”).
But transwomen won’t ever qualify as females, as much as so many of them so desperately want to be accepted as such: simply astounding levels of pathological envy. Feminist philosopher Jane Clare Jones had a rather brilliant post – A Dialogue Between a Transwoman and a Feminist – on that phenomenon several years ago:
“Trans woman: Ok, but why would you want to define woman as ‘adult human female’ and define ‘female’ like that? That excludes trans women.
JCJ: We’re not trying to exclude you from the category of female. You just are excluded. Because you’re not female.”
I think she kind of dropped the ball there by not defining “female” adequately, although I see a recent tweet of hers where she more or less rectified that omission:
“For the nth time peoples:
Female is a reproductive classification. You only think women are ‘reduced’ or ‘defined by’ this classification if you cannot grasp that female people are human beings.”
Far too many people – feminists and transwomen both – are trying to turn “female” into an identity, one based on some “mythic essence”, as Jones once put it, that serves only as a bone of contention, as a dangled prize of a golden apple “for the fairest”. Both need to simply accept the term as a label for a “reproductive classification” and underlying capabilities.
Re “woman” and “female”, Eliza Mondegreen has a good post over at Glinner today: The new global empire of disembodiment, describing the linguistic assault on the word “female”.
The redefinition of transwomen as not only being the “gender woman,” but the “sex female” involves treating an accumulation of secondary sex characteristics as the equivalent of a primary sex characteristic, and the artificial creation of what resembles or performs the function of a primary sex characteristic as counting the same. A transwoman with a “vagina” made from hollowing out and inverting the penis who has also gotten breast augmentation surgery and facial feminization surgery is physically female. Point out what’s missing and it’s like you’re saying women who’ve had hysterectomies are not women either.
The Achilles Heel of this argument from their standpoint is that it’s hard for them to apply this standard to the transwomen whose transition consists of glittery nail polish and smoky eyeshadow and say yes, they’re female too. Denying it, however, leads them away from total inclusion of ALL trans folx.
Sastra,
Someone who once had eyes but tragically lost them is different from a Potato Head doll where you can insert plastic eyes in the correct slots or anywhere else you please.
An inverted penis is not a vagina. Flesh-covered bags of silicone are not breasts. I confess to having seen pictures of faces on Gender Critical sites and thinking it’s the face of a transwoman that the GC site-owner is criticizing only to find out it’s the face of an adult human female (“woman”) who they’re interviewing. Their mannish faces don’t make them men anymore than an AMAB with facial feminization surgery is a woman.
Rare instances of people with Differences of Sexual Development don’t negate the reality that humans (like most if not all mammals) are sexually dimorphic. I’d hazard that most transwomen would be unproblematically termed as having been O[bserved]MAB. And men have a bad habit of being dangerous to women.
So yeah. It has to be one or the other. Obviously, someone whose dysphoria or whatever took them far enough to get “sexual reassignment surgery” would send different signals from a convicted rapist with a penis who doesn’t take estrogen shots, but like you say, …. it has to be all or nothing. TWATW. Which isn’t “women.”