Go ahead, violate the Geneva Convention
The ACLU gets the whole thing completely wrong and backward, starting with the headline.
A New York Jail Forced a Trans Woman Into a Men’s Facility
As opposed to what, ACLU? As opposed to forcing women to deal with a man in their facility.
Jena Faith’s experience in the Steuben County Jail was a living nightmare.
The military veteran spent four weeks in the jail awaiting trial last spring. She was initially housed in the jail’s women’s facility without incident, but things changed when officials suddenly transferred her to the men’s facility, despite the fact that she is a woman.
But he’s not a woman, so there is no “fact” that he’s a woman. He’s a man who wants to be or identifies as or presents as or thinks of himself as a woman.
And how confident can we be that his being housed in the jail’s women’s facility was really “without incident,” given the ACLU’s appalling blindness to the needs of women? How confident can we be that even assuming it was without overt or violent incident, all the women locked up with this man were perfectly at ease with the situation?
During the weeks that Jena spent as a woman in a men’s jail, she was routinely targeted with physical and verbal harassment from other incarcerated people and guards. On her first day in the men’s facility, a fellow incarcerated person started touching her body and blowing kisses at her, making her feel scared and uncomfortable.
If that’s true it’s bad. Jails should prevent physical and verbal harassment by guards or inmates or both. It doesn’t follow however that the women in the jail should pay the price for men’s physical and verbal harassment.
On August 22, the New York Civil Liberties Union, along with the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund and the law firm BakerHostetler, filed a lawsuit on behalf of Jena. It argues that what happened to her is a violation of numerous state laws designed to protect the rights, dignity, and humanity of trans people.
What about the rights, dignity, and humanity of women? Why does Jena’s fantasy identity trump all those women’s actual literal physical sex, which makes them a target of men? Why does the ACLU think that the way to protect a man who says he’s a woman from violent men is to force women to protect him? What if it turns out that he’s a danger to them? How can the ACLU possibly be so sure that will never be the case?
While Jena’s experience was harrowing, it’s not unique. Across the state, trans people are often held in jail and prison facilities that are not consistent with their gender, even though state law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and courts have held that it’s discriminatory to refuse to treat a person consistently with their gender identity.
How many trans men are there who clamor to be housed with the men? Any? Any at all?
If you were a trans man would you clamor to be housed with the men? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Why? Because I’d expect to be toast if I were so housed. (That shouldn’t be the case. Jails shouldn’t be dangerous for the inmates. The solution however is not to make women the shields.)
In part because they are housed incorrectly, trans people are exposed to overwhelming levels of abuse and harassment while behind bars, and they are far more likely than cisgender people to be targeted for the worst types of violence and mistreatment.
Trans people? Or trans women only? I suspect it’s the latter, and I suspect the ACLU does this trick knowingly.
Meanwhile have a bit of Geneva Convention:
Geneva Convention III
Article 25, fourth paragraph, and Article 29, second paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention III provide that in any camps in which men and women prisoners are accommodated together, separate dormitories and conveniences shall be provided for women.
Geneva Convention III
Article 97, fourth paragraph, and Article 108, second paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention III provide that women prisoners of war undergoing disciplinary punishment or convicted of an offence shall be confined in separate quarters from men and shall be under the immediate supervision of women.
Geneva Convention IV
Article 76, fourth paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV provides that women accused of an offence “shall be confined in separate quarters and shall be under the direct supervision of women”.
Maybe in his head Jena Faith genuinely thinks he’s a woman, but whether he does or not, women still have the right to be safe from him.
Well, yes, but times have changed since 1949. We’re much more enlightened now.
And our prisons and criminal justice systems are so much more humane
I didn’t think the US had ever signed on to that treaty but I’ve been wrong (numerous times) before…
The ACLU wouldn’t for a second argue that small-framed or effeminate men have a legal right to be housed in women’s prisons. Same for homosexual men, or cross-dressing men. All of them are just as vulnerable to abuse in men’s prisons as trans-identfying men are. The ACLU does not understand that trans identity is an arbitrary attribute that some men happen to possess, and it doesn’t make those men any less male than being left-handed, red-haired, diabetic or vegetarian does.
Oh, come on, Artymorty, around these parts, being vegetarian means a man isn’t a man at all…and he’s certainly not an American!
Yeah, we did sign the Geneva Convention. I looked it up in a cold sweat, and we did.
The ICC, nah, but somehow we forgot to do the wrong thing in 1929. Simpler times I guess.
iknklast, reminds me of the first time I was in the US. There was a confusing discussion that was resolved when we realised that in New Zealand “meat” is any animal flesh, whereas in that part of the US at least “meat” meant beef.
BTW, am I missing something? The Geneva Conventions apply to the conduct of warfare, not the regulation of civilian jails. Why is it even being raised in this context?
Not to say that they have force in the prisons, of course, but just to point out the way the issue is worded.
And I guess to say if the Geneva Conventions could get that bit right why can’t everyone else?
Re meat: I spent quite a lot of time in Germany in the early 90s and I was at that time vegetarian (as opposed to mostly vegetarian now). An astonishing number of people genuinely couldn’t seem to understand the concept of not eating meat. I’d order food, say, a salad, and explicitly state that I didn’t want any meat on it. It would come with ham. When I complained, they couldn’t see what I was complaining about. “It’s a salad…” was usually all I could get out of them.
Re jails: Some people have suggested special facilities or special areas of existing facilities for trans people. It seems fairly obvious that this wouldn’t work either, though. Who wouldn’t want to be in a cushy wing of the jail rather than the general population? And if self-identification is the only requirement…. it can hardly end well, can it?
That seems to be the motto of this decade. Trans dogma – it can hardly end well. Global warming denial – it can hardly end well. Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem – it can hardly end well. Electing Trump president – it can hardly end well.
It begins to feel as if ending well is no longer an option.
@ikn:
Perhaps we’re just becoming resigned to the fact that everything human will be ending pretty soon. Some of us still want to do the best we can before that happens, which makes these actions by the petty and self-interested even more painful than they would have been otherwise.
Perhaps we notice ends more – good or bad – when an end is inevitable anyway.
And the award for today’s gloomiest post goes to….
Sadly, the problems of Jena Faith and Karen White exist in the same world. If prisons were operated rationally and fairly, we would not accept violence and crime inside prison. The supervision required for inmates to be safe from ALL KINDS of assault should be enough.
The problem in women’s prisons is that the guards themselves sometimes sexually assaulted the prisoners (I imagine it’s mostly female guards now, though, which would make a difference). There wasn’t any motivation to put real safety measures in place to protect the women from sexual assault, because traditionally it was the male guards doing the assaulting.
And that isn’t untrue in male prisons, either. I don’t know about sexual assault by male guards on male inmates, but the guards are often as dangerous to the prisoners as the other prisoners are. And it is a really hard sell to get the public to care about prisoners being assaulted, because way too many people assume that a person in prison is guilty of something horrendous, and therefore deserves everything they get. Lots of factual and ethical errors in that assumption, but almost everyone I know accepts that idea as a truism.
Prisoner = Guilty of something awful = undeserving of protection from awful things.
That’s our society today. Factually and ethically challenged.
You know what’s interesting about this article?
Not once do they mention what charges this guy was locked up for. And given that “trans women” are vastly overrepresented in sex crimes statistics I’m gonna go ahead and guess it wasn’t for unpaid parking tickets. ACLU is a joke.
Panopticons didn’t protect prisoners very well, exactly because the people who *really* didn’t want to be watched were the guards. Surveillance isn’t the answer in modern prisons either, for the same reason.
latsot, #12.
Look on the bright side; at least we’ll get to see how it all ends.
Here is the report from his arrest. Charges included assault via choking, weapons possession, harassment with physical contact, and menacing.
https://bustednewspaper.com/ny-steuben-jena-faith-2017-10-26-051200/
Mmmmm, just the kind of guy you want to lock up with the women. What could go wrong?