Whose dignity?
This one is exceptionally hard to read without head explosions.
Women’s Liberation Front aka WoLF:
This week, WoLF received the disappointing news that the district court dismissed Chandler v. CDCR on procedural grounds. We are reviewing the decision and considering our options for the next steps in this case.
Background:
In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 132 (SB 132) into law. This legislation, which went into effect in January of 2021 as the “Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act”, allows incarcerated men to be housed in women’s correctional facilities based on self-declared “gender identity.” This law allows men to “self-identify” as women or non-binary, and be housed in women’s facilities.
Something in this paragraph leaps right out at me, clamoring for explanation.
Why why why why WHY did the California Senate pass a law to bolster the respect, agency, and dignity of men at the expense of the respect, agency, and dignity of women?
Why did that question not stop them before they started?
Why were they not nauseated at the idea of forcing men on women in prisons for the sake of the “dignity” of the men at the expense of the dignity of the women?
I’ll never be able to understand this. Never. I can’t get it to make any kind of sense.
Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) filed a lawsuit on behalf of four incarcerated women challenging SB132. WoLF asked the court to overturn this law and declare it unconstitutional.
But it was dismissed.
Coincidentally, as the judge in the Eastern District Court was dismissing the case, WoLF held a press conference on the steps of the California Superior Court in Madera County. Tremaine Carroll, an incarcerated male intervenor in the Chandler case, is now facing two counts of forcible rape and one count of attempting to dissuade a witness from testifying. The Madera District Attorney feels they have a very provable case. WoLF and WomanIIWoman held a press conference on the courthouse steps Friday, before the preliminary hearing, to raise awareness that rapes are indeed occurring within women’s custody facilities, committed by men who leveraged SB 132 to transfer in, despite having committed prior sexual assaults.
Rapes are occurring, but the dignity of the men doing the raping matters while the dignity of the women being raped does not.
Why?
I have no idea. It is in every way impossible to understand.
WoLF is not giving up.
We have already seen the devastating result of these policies in the two years it took to get a response from the court: rape, pregnancy, and repeated violation of women’s constitutional rights. This is not the end of our fight.
We will continue pursuing every avenue of justice for Janine, Tomiekia, Krystal, Nadia, and all incarcerated women in California.
Onward.
It makes sense if you just accept that it makes sense. Try believing it all makes sense for a bit, then you’ll realize that it makes sense, and you won’t be able to stop believing, because then it wouldn’t make sense, which wouldn’t make sense given that it makes sense. It’s so sensible that it makes itself make sense, which means that believing that it makes sense also makes sense. Conversely, it doesn’t make sense to believe that it doesn’t make sense, which is why you’re having a hard time understanding why it makes sense: you’re choosing to make it not make sense by believing that it doesn’t make sense and then complaining that it doesn’t make sense, which doesn’t make sense.
Hope that makes sense.
It TOTALLY makes sense.
So, TRADA, which is quite ironically fitting given the performance aspect of gender identity. Transgender Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts?
It reminds me of the apologetics for God in discussing the Problem of Evil. Why does God allow some human beings to harm other human beings? What is the justification for a supposedly Benevolent God to allow evil acts to be perpetrated? “God works in mysterious ways,” is a common non-answer answer. God’s great Plan is too grand for puny human brains to comprehend, but there must be some Grand Scheme, some overarching Plan in which it is somehow Benevolent, or good and right, for God to allow seemingly evil acts to occur. “Free will” is one such excuse. God has to allow human beings to have and to exercise their free will — to do evil things, or to “sin” — because it is a much greater and more benevolent state of affairs if human beings come to choose to love God freely, than it is to have created a paradoxically tyrannical paradise, in which human beings have no ability to choose not to love God, and this no ability to choose evil or sin. The “Free Will” argument falls short, imo, in significant ways, not least of which is that God is still determining whose free will matters. Why does the “free will” of the child rapist matter so much more than the free will of the child? The child doesn’t have any free will in the matter; only the rapist’s free will matters. Why is that? The Free will of one negates the free will of the other. Why does God choose that? Why call it “benevolent”? No, “free will” is not an answer to the problem of evil, when the free will of only some — the evil ones — is operative, and the free will of others is wholly abrogated.
Because they are men and therefore they matter and their demands should be heeded, certainly over the needs and safety of women
AND
they are members of a minority group that has successfully presented itself as super-oppressed; it is a display of righteousness to give them what they ask for. After all, it is not going to cost the politicians anything.
I remember thinking that men identifying themselves into women’s prisons would be the issue that knocked gender ideology on its head. The problem would be obvious to all, surely.
Fast forward to the present, I can understand—although it is enraging—politicians voting along party lines for legislation they’ve perhaps not even read, etc. What I’ll never understand is the behaviour of medics such as in the following examples:
https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/consent-to-medical-transition-at
How can medical experts be so brazenly reckless?!
It’s all dependent upon beief. Unbelievers are like kryptonite, their mere presence and refusal to submit are enough to start a cascade of doubt. I think this is what’s behind the shrill claims that events featuring gender critical people are “dangerous” and “unsafe” for trans people; pointed critiques, questions, and doubts are a danger to the belief system that trans ideologues have used to get their way in so many places, including the (for them) required erosion of women’s rights. Dissent and resistance must be silenced out of hand, and characterized as beyond the pale, and actually evil. Opponents are “allied with Nazis and fascists” or actually Nazis and fascists (Hi there, Billy Bragg!). Check. They have absolutely no legitimate reason to oppose trans “rights”, they’re only doing this out of their unreasoning, malevolent desire to harm trans people. They’re not “pro-women”, they’re “anti-trans.” Check. Nobody is allowed to hear them speak, because their words destroy the spell of belief.
It’s similar to a vociferous blasphemer’s not being struck dead by Divine Lightning; their very existence is like a loose thread of doubt that must be cut, lest others tug on it and unravel the whole religion. Why doesn’t our god punish this unbeliever, why are they still alive?” That’s why blasphemy laws exist; religionists know in their heart of hearts (and from experience) that their god doesn’t (or can’t) strike down evil doers in the way they wish (and in the way their own holy books tell them it came to pass in the past), so they’re forced to do their deity’s dirty work themselves. So you get god’s “enforcers” falling over each other in their zealous demonstrations of violent piety, thereby camouflaging and expiating any of their own secret doubts in the process.
So, the “Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act” is a essentially a religious law. The State has officially declared trans identified males as The Most Vulnerable, and this ex cathedra ruling is not to be gainsaid. Thus sanctified, these men can now do no wrong, because, officially, infallibly, it is now a State sanctioned Fact that they are no longer men. How much farther will these emboldened men, given license to rape at will, go? God knows. But in the meantime, women are to stay silent and submit to their betters, and by God, that’s what they’re going to be made to do.
Maddog:
You ignorantly or purposely left out the other half of the Free Will argument: the Fallen principle. God gave men free will confident that they would only know of Good and behave accordingly, but then that weak slut Eve ate the (metaphorical) apple of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So God made the only and obvious choice: to curse all of Adam and Eve’s descendants with the knowledge of and predilection to do Evil.
This all makes perfect sense.
If it doesn’t make sense to you, scroll up and read Nullius’ brilliant and definitive treatise on Sense and Not Sense until it does. And may God have mercy on your fallen soul.
That must be it. Eve, therefore men in women’s prisons.
One can, of course, regarding ‘Free Willies’ (especially in women’s prisons), consult Calvin, who at least has the virtue of being consistent (since God knows everything, He has known from the beginning of time who is destined to Hell & who to Heaven), whereas Catholic theologians throw up their hands when they get to the point of having to declare for Free Will or for predestination, declaring instead that it is a ‘mystery’.
Calvin also declares somewhere that God will arouse intimations of hope in those predestined for the Other Place, so that hope may be dashed and sinners may despair the more deeply, and therefore (since despair is a mortal sin) deserve their predestined fate yet more.
I don’t recommend John Bunyan’s ‘Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners’ – I found it almost unbearable to read as Bunyan, who was in many ways a brave & admirable man, ties himself in knots while wrestling with the problem of predestination and trying to work out whether he is one of the elect or not. But I suppose reading it is salutary in some ways.
But there is also one of the greatest little-known novels of the British Isles: the Scottish writer James Hogg’s
‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’. It is brilliant, and was described in Walter Allen’s ‘The English Novel’ as ‘an astonishing self-exposure of religious aberration and delusion … a psychological document compared with which Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde” is a crude morality.’.
That’s so disgusting. Calvin rouses devils in me.
Well, there you are, Ophelia! He rouses devils in me, too, but Calvin would find that a definite sign of damnation. There’s no escape from his, and God’s, trap.
Yaboosucks, Monsieur Calvin, it’s all made up. You wasted your life so nyah.
I think it is always a good idea to try to find arguments for a point of view you vehemently oppose.
So, here are at least some arguments why transwomen belong in women’s prisons:
1. If you claim that they are a danger to women because of sexual attraction, by the same logic you would have to exclude lesbians who are also attracted to women. It is actually known that there are sexual attacks from women on women in women’s prisons. So if you accept one risk, why not the other?
2. Yes, some transwomen may be dangerous. But you cannot condemn all of them because of that. By the same logic, you could argue (as people actually did) that because some gays are pedophiles, gays must not be allowed to work with children. You cannot condemn all members of a group because of the bad behaviour of some of them.
3. Trans women suffer from gender dysphoria and feel like women. They already are a minority that is in danger of being attacked by men. To put them in men’s prisons would be a cruel punishment.
Please note: I’m not saying that these are good arguments. I’m just saying that these arguments can be used for motivated reasoning and can be used by people to convince themselves that trans women do belong in women’s prisons. Use these together with social pressure of your group and you will be easily convinced. As it is well-known, smart people are not necessarily better at critical thinking, they are mainly better at finding arguments to rationalize their beliefs.
(Actually, I think if people would not have started the whole “self-ID” business and if the very small number of men who actually suffer from dysphoria and who have had surgery were to be allowed in womens’ prisons, it would not really be a big problem since these probably really do not pose a big risk. It was the “we want it all”-attitude of “a claim of being trans must never be doubted” that really caused the problems here.)
I’m gonna say the bit they try to keep quiet:
It’s fairly obvious that, within a men’s prison, transwomen would be targeted for rape. Male-on-male rape is already way too common in men’s prisons, and transwomen would absolutely be tagged as preferred victims. So, they must be protected, because rape is bad.
Now, of course, doing this by placing them in women’s prisons is, of course, going to lead to women being raped by opportunistic transwomen (whether or not their claims to such status is genuine by whatever metric one gauges that standard). But that’s not considered important, because women are USED to being raped, really, while transwomen who get assaulted are experiencing something that upsets the natural order. Ergo, the women must be sacrificed.
I really wish I didn’t think this was part of the subconscious calculus going on here, but I can’t ignore the odds that it’s a major theme.
If God exists. I hope that Monsieur Calvin got a nasty surprise after death. “What, I’m not one of the elect! God, you got it wrong!”
Some comments on Sonderval’s arguments for transwomen’s being allowed to occupy women’s prisons:
So-called ‘transwomen’ are not women; they are men by definition. They do not possess the basic qualification for occupying women-only spaces.
Lesbians are by definition women.
Men as a class are stronger than women and therefore potentially much more dangerous to women.
Men can impregnate women, with all that that entails; women cannot.
Certain people, we are told, identify as horses: do they belong in stables?
@Nightcrow
Of course there are lots of good counterarguments. I’m just trying to understand how people convince themselves that sometimes men belong on women’s prisons.