I stopped giving to ACLU years ago when it became clear their mission to champion a grab-bag of lefty causes had superseded their free-speech defending goal. This pivot has lead them, at times, to actually defend the government against citizen requests for public records! I never thought I'd see the ACLU fighting on the government's behalf against FOIA/open records type requests but here it is: https://www.womensliberationfront.org/aclu-lawsuit-public-re...
In the above case, some female prisoners in Washington state wanted to know how many male prisoners had been transferred to women's prisons. The state didn't want to share that information (even in aggregate) and the ACLU defended the state's assertion that this information should be kept secret from the public, including from the imprisoned women whom this policy impacted directly.
Why the government would want to keep this secret is a good question, but the main point here is: did people donating to the ACLU realize their money is being used to fight private citizen information requests & defend government secrecy? How the mighty have fallen.
>Why the government would want to keep this secret is a good question
It's because if the public found out, it would be either be considered illegal or unethical or ultimately make them look bad. That's the general rule of why anyone in government keeps an action secret. Now consider how much stuff the government wants to keep secret.
I guess the follow up question would be why the government transferred biological men to a women's prison, especially if it could be illegal, unethical and make them look bad?
Not a follow-up for the ACLU, who should be concentrating solely on records release (on the opposite side than they took.)
The modern disease is that everyone seems to be running a keynesian beauty contest, trying to figure out what side the truth is better for, and pretending it's a lie if it's against their side. Principles aren't a means, they're an end.
It's a world of propagandists (public relations professionals.)
IIRC, FOIA does not grant you a right to personal information collected on citizens. The agencies have the right to redact that in whole or in part from the records sought. I don't deny your main concern about left wing issues potentially derailing the ACLU's chief mission, but that isn't the example I'd cite.
How is releasing raw statistics about inmates based on demographics creating "a target list"? I don't see where they are asking for a list of individual identities.
The public records act doesn't include personal information:
> personal student or patient information, employee files, and some investigative records are exempt.
You could silence tons of scientific studies with this sort of broad rejection of data collection simply because you deem a subset of the group 'vulnerable' (including just as many studies that benefit these groups). It could be applied in many other ways beyond state prisons.
Some of the requests are directly for the names and ages of individuals, but the government doesn't have the statistics requested and want to "provide records from which requestors may derive answers to their own questions" for the statistics requests as well. The ACLU is objecting to this to the extent that it would "include highly sensitive information" that identifies individuals. The ACLU is not asking the court to block the government from releasing raw statistics. They want to prevent them from releasing a literal list of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.
There are also requests for infractions, complaints, reports, etc. If you think this is agienst the law, then you agree with the ACLU.
WoLF are representing Andrea Kelly. The ACLU's own filing, that you linked to, confirms that she requested only statistical data, not personally-identifying information:
> 4.8 On March 19, 2021, Requestor Andrea Kelly made a public records
request to Defendant Washington State Department of Corrections that sought the
following records:
> - "The number of transgender individuals currently incarcerated broken out by facility location."
> - "Number of incarcerated individuals who have been transferred from a
men's facility to a women's facility since January 1, 2021."
> - "The number of male incarcerated individuals who identify as female, non-
binary or any other gender identity who are currently housed at a Women's
prison facility."
> - "The number of incarcerated individuals who have transferred from a
Women's facility to a Men's facility since January 1, 2021."
> - "The number of female incarcerated individuals who identify as male, non-
binary or any other gender identity who are currently housed in a Men's
prison facility."
I do wonder if you read past that first paragraph you quoted, because the above section supports the facts of WoLF's article that you erroneously called out as "outright lying".
> “The names and ages of the transgender or gender non-conformists inmates moved to Purdy and the convictions they are serving time for.”
> “The names of all transgendered incarcerated individuals who have requested, received or are scheduled for gender reassignment surgery.”
However, even with only the requests made by Andrea Kelly, the DOC indented to provide private information about individuals in order to allow the requester to derive answers to their questions, as it doesn't have the statistics requested. This is what ACLU sued to prevent. See:
> 4.20 The Attorney General, on behalf of DOC, has indicated in discussions with DRW that DOC does not create records in response to requests for aggregate numerical information. Instead, the Attorney General explained that DOC will identify as responsive and provide records from which requestors may derive answers to their own questions. DOC has not provided DRW a list of what records have been identified by DOC as responsive to the requests. Based on DRW’s knowledge of DOC records, such records will likely include highly sensitive information about transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and/or intersex inmates and former inmates.
The ACLU never asked the court to stop the government from responding with statistics, but the government doesn't have the statistics requested.
No, I think they are lying when they say the ACLU is suing to "prevent the public from receiving public records from the Washington State Department of Corrections on the number of inmates in state custody who identify as transgender and the number of male inmates who are housed in women’s facilities" because there are no such records and they are actually suing to prevent the release of people's identities. They are also lying by omission and competently misrepresenting the case by not mentioning what other kind of information was requested and how the government intends to respond to the request for the statistics it doesn't possess.
How about a more charitable interpretation, rather than accusing people of lying: ACLU's position is that these shouldn't be public records, WoLF's is that the government should release whatever public records are required to fulfil the request.
Please reread my comment, I don't use the terms "man" or "men" once. It seems you object to the idea that imprisoned female people should be allowed to have an opinion on being forced to share a jail cell with a male person.
Personally, I think female people are well within their rights to voice concerns about this. If you see it differently, I'd be grateful to hear your rationale on why the government should be able to move males into women's prisons in secret, as the ACLU asserts.
In general "male" refers to sex, "men" to gender. While I agree the comment could be written more kindly, this comment was referring to biological sex, not gender identity.
No matter how nasty the reason was for the FOIA request - why should an organization who historically has defended free speech in most if not all circumstances going to such lengths to defeat it? What happened to defending the Westboro Baptist Church and skinheads re: freedom of speech?
Let's say there was a hypothetical corporation looking to identify employee participation in a protest. Would you defend that corporation making an FOIA request to identify who might've participated?
Who's freedom of speech do you think deserves to be defended, the corporation or the individuals in question?
Now apply that logic to this scenario, where the group in question is looking to identify individuals in order to make a scapegoat out of them for their own private decisions. Who's freedom deserves defending?
>IIRC, FOIA does not grant you a right to personal information collected on citizens. The agencies have the right to redact that in whole or in part from the records sought.
These are citizens private healthcare information. You shouldn't be able to foia this anymore than my medicare records. Citizens don't lose their right to privacy because they're in prison. Goodness.
Aggregate counts are not private healthcare information when released in a way that limits reidentification. The Privacy Act (and HIPAA) allows for deidentified data to be shared broadly.
Anyway, prisoner gender is not healthcare data, it’s administrative data that describes prisoner population demographics.
I would agree with you if the request was for individual medical information on treatment or procedures or something.
> Aggregate counts are not private healthcare information when released in a way that limits reidentification. The Privacy Act (and HIPAA) allows for deidentified data to be shared broadly.
Possibly, but you're almost assuredly looking at a sample of N=10 or fewer, so the answer would be "*" anyway.
Not if it’s just a count. Because, even with a low count it wouldn’t be used to identify someone.
Let’s say there were 3 transgender people in the state, or even a facility. If they reveal that number it doesn’t identify an individual or divulge any confidential information.
The low counts have to be suppressed when coupled with other data or linked to other data.
If you included count by age group, then you would need to change from a low count to a suppressed marker.
For example 3 transgenders in the 80+ age group might reveal their identity because there aren’t many 80+ inmates.
But just having a small count with no other info is not really a cause to remove the value.
It sounded like aggregate numbers were being requested, not names. (Though, the link is only one side of the story.) Assuming that is correct (that it is merely an aggregate count), does that not maintain medical privacy, while allowing public access to the information on how the state is running prisons?
I don't think your sex is "private healthcare information." How would sharing the total number of males in various facilities violate an individuals privacy rights? (sidebar: if you think you retain your right to privacy in prison... all I can say is you've clearly never been to prison :)
Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
>I don't think your sex is "private healthcare information."
Your sex is private information under GDPR. Why would the GDPR be stricter than than HIPAA in this case?
>Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
"But what about the children?" is never a good argument for taking the away the rights of others.
You're assuming male prisoners have a "right" to be housed with female prisoners, and that female prisoners have no right to sex-segregated facilities. Whether the former "right" exists is far from a settled question.
Assuming the former right does exist, then there is a conflict of rights (between the wishes of males who want to be housed with females, and females who want to be housed without males). Rights conflicts like this are not solved by simply telling one group (in this case, women) to shut up and stop complaining.
This is nonsense that serves only to obfuscate. Normally this sort of stuff is put forward by people trying to confuse and befuddle the reader.
We segregate prisons by sex. Primary and secondary sex characteristics are observable characteristics that indicate one's sex.
Your argument is like saying "You don't buy a Mazda. You go to the Mazda dealership and buy a car that says Mazda on the back, interior, and on the manual. You don't actually know the car is a Mazda."
No, my argument is people mistake a used car lot for a licensed dealership. Just because the salesman says its a Mazda and it has a little logo in the front doesn't tell you much about its history, modifications, etc. Intersex people are in fact pretty common, so much so that there are more intersex olympic athletes than there are trans ones.
Using "males" and "females" here is irrelevant and actively seeking to confuse.
People typically consider that women (cis or trans) have a right to be housed together, and separately from cismen.
If anything, the biggest problem of policy are trans-men, who would likely feel much more concerned by being housed with cis-man prisoners, but who would also make women uncomfortable.
> A woman is, quite simply, an adult human female.
So an adult human female (XX phenotype) who is taking masculinizing hormones and thus has a beard, body hair, a heavy voice, and perhaps has had his breasts surgically removed, or even had penile reconstruction surgery, is, in your opinion, a woman?
If he is not naked and you do not have a genotypic test result, how would would you know? Do you think a woman seeing him in a women's locker or in a women's bathroom would feel comfortable? Or would she feel more comfortable with a male that has a female body and clothing presentation (say, Caitlyn Jenner)?
Also, your definitions of course leave no room for people with various biological conditions that leave them with an uncertain biological sex - hermaphrodytism, XXY genotype, chymerism (multiple genotypes in different tissues), testosterone resistance (natural female phenotype despite a male genotype) etc.
> So an adult human female (XX phenotype) who is taking masculinizing hormones and thus has a beard, body hair, a heavy voice, and perhaps has had his breasts surgically removed, or even had penile reconstruction surgery, is, in your opinion, a woman?
Yes. She's a woman who has taken masculinizing hormones, and had cosmetic surgery. She is not changing her sex. She remains female, and is therefore a woman.
Consider this: the women athletes who have doped with testosterone, did they become men? No, of course not. What if they got breast cancer and had to have a double mastectomy? Also no - they're still women.
It's so odd to me that liberals, who seem to care a lot about women's rights, just flat out dismiss women who are genuinely concerned about being raped in prison by males who were secretly transferred to female prisons.
>"But what about the children?" is never a good argument for taking the away the rights of others.
I also hope that you don't point to school shootings to argue against the second amendment then.
Why is that surprising? There is no proof that transwomen are any more likely to rape ciswomen than other ciswomen are.
On the other hand, it is well known that transwomen are much more often the victims of rape by cismen, if living in men's prisons.
If anything, I would think the biggest problem here is the fate of transmen. I doubt a ciswoman would feel very comfortable sharing a cell with a transman, but a transman also has much higher chances of being abused if sharing a cell with a cisman.
Do you think a cis woman would fear being raped more by Natalie Wynn[0] or by Buck Angel[1]? I would bet that its the latter.
To be clear: not accusing either of those above of being an actual rapist! Just asking which would be more likely to inspire this fear in someone who doesn't know them.
> Why is that surprising? There is no proof that transwomen are any more likely to rape ciswomen than other ciswomen are.
Here's an analysis of data from the Ministry of Justice in the UK, demonstrating that trans-identifying males have similar patterns of criminality to other males, including sexual assault: https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-se...
> There is no proof that transwomen are any more likely to rape ciswomen than other ciswomen are.
There is no proof males who identify as trans (transwomen) are any less likely to commit rape than males who do not identify as trans. The rape risk of being housed with a male is real regardless of how the male identifies with regards to gender. If you have data to the contrary (data indicating that trans identifying males are less likely to commit rape than other males) please share.
The article notes that the relationships were consensual. Like, do you think no one in prison would want to have sex? (The article could be misleading, but also there's presumably lots of consensual sex in prison, much as there is quite a bit of non-consensual sex).
>It's so odd to me that liberals, who seem to care a lot about women's rights, just flat out dismiss women who are genuinely concerned about being raped in prison by males who were secretly transferred to female prisons.
Really? Are there actual women who are genuinely concerned about this or is this a strawman invented by other people? You see this same issue with transwomen in sports. There is massive concern-trolling for women "who want a level playing field", but when you actually _ask_ women who compete with them (like in the case of Lia Thomas), they don't have a problem with it.
You are masking your transphobia in coddling for women who aren't even complaining about these issues. Women in prison are far more likely to be raped by law enforcement; but somehow the 3 or so transwomen who might sleep in the same cell as a woman is a bigger mark for the ACLU.
>I also hope that you don't point to school shootings to argue against the second amendment then.
That's actually pretty simple for me, I don't think gun rights are inalienable rights, no more than I think I have a right to own a playstation.
> what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
Keeping penises out of the same room with vaginas will not magically eliminate sexual assault because sexual assault is based on power and willingness to harm another, not whether not tab A physically fits into slot B.
If you think keeping penises away from vaginas will eliminate prison rape then clearly you don't know much about rape in mens' prisons.
I am having trouble following your line of thinking. You're saying that because rape is common in mens' prisons* we should not be concerned about putting males in women's prisons? Wouldn't it make more sense to say "men rape in mens prisons, so women's concerns about being housed with males is reasonable"?
In any event, I still don't see how any of this justifies keeping this whole topic in the shadows and making public discourse impossible by keeping the scope of the question secret from the public.
* I'm taking your word for this, haven't looked it up.
The goal (I assume! You haven't spelled this out.) is to reduce the rate of sexual assault between cellmates in prison.
The system has to determine who can end up in the same cell. Prison wardens have access to some data about prisoners. The question is which data is used to partition prisoners.
Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault.
My point is that that claim requires some level of supporting evidence since the widespread accounts of prison rape in same-sex prisons implies that simply avoiding penises and vaginas in the same cell does not appear to be sufficient to lower the chances of rape.
Implicit in your comment is only looking at this from the perspective of the woman in the cell who doesn't have a penis. But the other cellmate has to end up somewhere and the overall goal should be to reduce the rate of sexual assault for all prisoners, not just cis ones.
So, if you don't allow trans women into women's cells, where do you put them? And do you really think putting a trans woman in a cell with a male prisoner is going to lead to a lower incidence of assault?
The "penis and vagina" characterization is too reductive. What's at issue is that males are generally bigger, stronger, and more sexually aggressive than females. These factors in aggregate create increased risk when forcing proximity between men and women while in vulnerable contexts. But none of this needs extra demonstration, this is all common knowledge.
hrt is effectively chemical castration by another name. one of the primary effects of estrogen and anti androgens is erectile dysfunction combined with the shrinking & atrophy of the genitals along with a typically highly diminished sex drive.
on balance, this issue, just like sports, is incredibly optically poor for trans people regardless of the facts at hand. the suggestion that mtf trans create an elevated risk for rapes and assaults is a deeply unfair cultural bias that is probably not going away for at least a generation. similarly putting mtf trans into the male prison system seems likely to subject them to incredibly high risk. there are other nations & cultures that have had a legally recognized 3rd gender for much longer than trans rights have been an area of focus in the west, i imagine we could learn a great deal from them on these issues in particular.
Not all trans-identifying people use HRT. Indeed some deliberately make no bodily interventions whatsoever - see e.g. Alex Drummond, a 'trans woman' with beard, moustache, and his intact male body.
Third gender in the cultures you allude to is typically just a way of othering gay man, of the "you can't be a real man" variety. It's nothing positive to emulate.
> Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault.
> My point is that that claim requires some level of supporting evidence.
The DOJ says 99% of rape and sexual assaults are by males, and that 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault are female and 9% male [1].
This is generic data, not trans specific or prison specific. But in the absence of specific data, it seems pretty relevant.
I’d argue if prisons have significant rates of sexual assault that prisons are doing little to prevent then prisoner’s should have a right to a private cell. You don’t get to engage in huge rights violations against people who can’t defend themselves for budgetary reasons.
> Your claim appears to be that one prisoner having a penis and the other having a vagina is a strong predictor of an increased odds of sexual assault.
If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all?
It sounds like you're arguing for mixed sex prisons, even within individual cells.
> If you don't think this is an issue, can you explain why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all?
Historically, mostly patriarchal misogyny; specifically, the belief that while women were inherently more virtuous, those who had “fallen” a state subject to imprisonment had fallen further, and less correctibly than men, and that they were a corrupting influence that would impair the rehabilitation of imprisoned men (that's also why imprisoned women, originally segregated within prisons rather than in separate prisons, were often given fewer meals, not encouraged to socialize, and otherwise treated worse than male prisoners.)
More recently, in order to avoid reexamining the actual policy of segregation, societies have tried to retcon a more modern rationalization, but that rationalization is not actually the reason for the policy, just an excuse for it.
That is not universally true, even if it may have applied to some parts of the US prison system in the past.
In particular, influential British prison reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, promoted sex segregation as a means to prevent the sexual exploitation of women prisoners. They also pushed for many other reforms to make prisons safer and more rehabilitative environments in general. Nothing to do with patriarchal misogyny.
More recently, the UN's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, first adopted in 1955, states as one of the standards that "men and women shall so far as possible be detained in separate institutions; in an institution which receives both men and women the whole of the premises allocated to women shall be entirely
separate". Their rationale was not patriarchal misogyny either, but rather how to maintain a safe and dignified environment for inmates.
Let me take a step back and look at this another way. The initial comment I replied to looked at the issue only from the perspective of the woman in the cell. It treated it as "should a trans woman be with her: yes/no?".
But that's not the actual choice prisons have to make. The choice they have to make is "which cell does the trans woman go into"? Given that there likely aren't enough trans women prisoners to put them only with other trans women, the choice is "with a cis man or with a cis woman." And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman.
I could be wrong. But given what I've read about trans women being the target of sexual assault outside of prison and sexual assault among males in male prisons, I think it's a fairly safe bet.
I guess the question hinges on whether you imagine a trans woman to be more "like a man" (stereotypically stronger, aggressive, and more prone to perpetrate assault) or "like a woman" (stereotypically weaker, passive, and more prone to being the victim of assault). What I know about trans women suggests the latter more than the former.
Obviously, individual behavior trumps all. Any particular woman (trans or not) who has a history of violence or sexual assault towards women should not be housed with another woman. The same should be true for men (again, trans or not).
The name of the game should be keeping perpetrators away from victims, and my belief is that "has a penis while other has a vagina" is a relatively poor proxy for that. Yes, there is a strong correlation, but that's a Simpson's paradox from combining the much smaller trans population with the very large cis population. If you were to separate out the datasets and consider cis men and women separately from trans men and women, I suspect you would see no or the opposite correlation.
In summary: women in prison are being raped and sexually assaulted by trans-identifying males, who should never have been locked up in women's prisons in the first place.
It really is well beyond time for authorities to reverse these ridiculous policies that elevate claims of gender identity above all other concerns, and return to segregating prisons by sex like we had previously.
Three news articles about three isolated incidents, regardless of how horrific they are, are not sufficient to design good policy. In the US in 2012, "an estimated of 4.0% of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff since their admission to the facility or in the past twelve months".
Those three articles are a drop in the bucket.
Consider that there are N trans women convicts and you're trying to decide where to house them. The relevent number is not "how many women do they rape if you house them with other women"? It's "What is the relative difference in rape stasticics between housing them with men versus women?"
Obviously, any number of sexual assaults is unacceptable. But if housing trans women with men leads to thousands of rapes while housing them with women leads to only dozens, it's still a better policy. The only reason you could argue against that is if you consider a trans woman being a victim somehow more acceptable than a cis woman being victimized.
It's not just those three articles though. When you consider these in the context of other data, such as this from the UK - https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-se... - which shows that trans-identifying males have similar patterns of criminality to other males, including sexual assault, the reality of the situation becomes clear: these inmates are not some special type of women who happen to have been born male, but men like any other.
So then the argument is just around the question, should women and men be housed in the same prisons, without any sex segregation? And we already know the answer to that.
> And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman.
Why do you believe this?
Anyway, I believe women have a right to dignity and privacy and to set some boundaries against males in refuges & places they are especially vulnerable. Female prisoners should absolutely be allowed to refuse to share sleeping quarters with males. Frankly think it's nuts that this should be considered a controversial stance.
> Anyway, I believe women have a right to dignity and privacy and to set some boundaries against males in refuges & places they are especially vulnerable.
I believe everyone has a right to dignity and privacy and the right to set some boundaries against others in refuges and places where they are especially vulnerable.
What I don't understand is people that thinks that this right disappears just because the “other“ is of the same gender (whether that's gender socially ascribed at birth, or gender identity really is a side issue.)
The simplest answer is to segregate by sex, it's not clear why gender identity should require moving to another facility.
Regarding the supposed issue of safety of trans identifying male prisoners in male prisons (I haven't seen data around this but let's assume it's an issue), it's still not clear the answer is housing with women. If a gay man is more likely to be abused in a male prison, or a small or young man, does that mean men with any of these characteristics should be put in women's prison to improve their safety conditions? This doesn't scan.
Its notable to me that as concerned as you are about prisoner safety, I don't see you or other advocates of males in womens prisons mention the safety of the female prisoners should men be added to their cells. Does their safety not rate?
> Its notable to me that as concerned as you are about prisoner safety, I don't see you or other advocates of males in womens prisons mention the safety of the female prisoners
Strange that despite the much higher rates of sexual assault (inmate on inmate and staff on inmate) for women in the sex segregated prison system we have, the only time safety of women prisoners gets brought up is as an argument for preserving sex segregation against the fairly minor tweak of gender-identity segregation and not about trying to figure out why a system adopted specifically to isolate and impose harsher punishment on women because they were viewed as incapable of rehabilitation once they had fallen into crime continues, despite recent retcons of it's supposed justification, to disproportionately sexual victimize women.
> And I believe pretty strongly that putting a trans woman in a cell with a cis male is more likely to result in assault than putting a trans woman with a cis woman.
Why do you believe this?
And, more importantly, why is it somehow the responsibility of women to be used as a mitigation for male on male violence?
If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue. So why should incarcerating the trans-identifying male amongst women be the solution?
> If a male attacks a trans-identifying male, or there is a risk of this happening, that is entirely a male issue.
No, if a prisoner attacks a prisoner with whom they were placed, due to reasons which are reasonably foreseeable and preventable, it's a prison system issue, not an issue for the gender class of the attacker or victim, whether they are the same or different, irrespective of the basis in which gender is ascribed.
Even moreso than with restrooms, it's very clear that gender segregation, whether based on ascribed gender at birth or gender identity, is not even approximately an effective protection against predatory behavior [*], so the safety issue:
(1) Isn't a good defense for any model of gender segregation, and
(2) Needs addressed by mechanisms other than gender segregation (one of the more effective of which is probably imprisoning fewer people, at lower levels of crowding), which, surprisingly, pretty much no one that is using the danger to argue for their preferred model of gender segregation even pretends to be concerned about.
[*] Edit: and this is particularly true for women in our segregated system who face twice the incidence of inmate-on-inmate assault, as well as higher rates of staff-on-inmate assault, and far less social attention to the problem of such assaults. If anything, it's more defensible based on outcomes to say our system of segregation exists to protect sexual assault against women prisoners than to say it exists to protect against sexual assault for anyone.
So are you advocating for entirely mixed-sex prisons or what? That's an extremely radical view.
An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex. This is in addition to other policies regarding the prison environment.
If you want to undo that policy of sex segregation, you should have a very good reason, and proof that it won't cause harm to the sex who, in general, have lesser physical strength and can be impregnated by the other.
> An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex.
No, it hasn't.
That's an after the fact rationalization for preserving the policy invented long after segregation on fairly explicitly misogynistic grounds was established, when the original motivation was no longer something people felt comfortable saying overtly in government.
Preventing assaults (and sexual assaults specifically) in prisons is not a major motivator for the structure of our prison system; if it was, there'd be a lot fewer sexual assaults in it.
It doesn't matter that the segregation was originally pushed for with the benefit of male prisoners in mind. If you look at the conditions for women in prison before and after sex segregation, it was an improvement.
We shouldn't be regressing back and allowing men to be incarcerated alongside women again, unless there is a provably good reason for this - which, so far, no-one has demonstrated.
> why we should have any sex segregation in prisons at all?
Or age segregation. Just because a 50 year old man has a penis and is 3x the weight of a 13 year old girl doesn't mean that they shouldn't be locked in a cell together. That's just your bigoted assumption that he's a violent person, you don't even know him.
Ironically, a lot of the arguments I've seen could be construed as misandrist because they're operating under the presumption that men are rapists and thus transgender people in women's prisons must be rapists. That's why the argument always focuses around transgender women while failing to address that their same argument would send transgender men to the far less safe male prison.
The actual problem is that prisons are unsafe for everyone and there's little done to make them safer. But they'd rather use transgender people in their culture war because they don't care about the actual violence problems.
You mean they'd rather fix the problem that is entirely an own goal than tackle the problem of reorganizing the entire penal system in a deeply unpopular and expensive way?
Once prison is organized like a summer camp with a 2:1 guard to prisoner ratio, we can do them co-ed.
One would assume surgery or hormones are required to change your gender designation in Washington State, but in fact this is not the case (neither is required). Here's the form to change gender designation on your driver's license in WA, anyone living in washington state can do it today: https://www.dol.wa.gov/forms/520043.pdf
It's all about 'gender identity' these days, not hormones and surgery.
Indeed, in trans circles, expecting the latter as a required factor is often considered highly offensive. This, and the notion that a person needs to experience gender dysphoria to be trans, is now derisively known as the 'truscum' point of view.
I think the vast majority of binary trans people consider gender expression to be an integral part of gender identity, and at least a majority also consider HRT or surgery to be a significant component. I think there are close to 0 people walking around with a beard and wearing masculine suits that identify as transwomen.
Non-binary people are another discussion, and how they should fit into male/female spaces is of course unclear.
Overall, I would agree that prison assignment should depend on more than reported identity. Especially since it is conceivable that people in prison are likelier to lie about their internal identity if they believe they can get something out of this lie. This is much less relevant for lower risk environments, such as bathrooms (in my country at least, unisex bathrooms are anyway quite common) or gym lockers.
> Regarding the right to privacy, what's your take on the privacy rights of the (female) women who are being physically forced to house & sleep in a cell with males?
Any argument here about privacy is entirely independent of sex and gender. Prison is dehumanizing, address that. Don't be a transphobe.
Edit: There's a bunch of mistaken comments here assuming that this will protect women prisoners in some capacity. That's totally wrong! Women in prison are sexually assaulted, raped, and even impregnated by men all the time and have been for years. Those men are guards[0]. And this happens at a vastly higher rate per capita and overall than any assault by trans inmates. Anyone here with a legitimate interest in protecting women in prison would be attempting to address that harm, because it is far more dire for numerous reasons.
Is a woman a transphobe for not wanting to share a jail cell with a person who has a penis? I think most people would consider safeguarding female prisoners from males common sense.
I think you should take a moment to consider the (female) women in this situation. Imagine you're a woman 100% at the mercy of the state, and the state locks you in a cell with a male person. Put yourself in their shoes, and try to extend some empathy to them.
I never made any comment about women in prison. I have empathy to anyone in prison. Like I said, its deeply inhumane.
I think people in prison should be protected from other people in prison if they are dangerous, and I think prisons fail to do that today. I don't accept your presumption that having a penis makes someone inherently more dangerous.
Again: if your goal is to protect women in prison, the best way to do that is to advocate for reform that makes prisons safer for everyone. Not by being transphobic, which you're doing instead.
> people in prison should be protected from other people in prison
I strongly agree; if you deprive someone of their liberty, then you take on the responsibility of protecting them - because you've deprived them of the ability to protect themselves.
I'm not aware of any prison regime that takes the safety of prisoners as a key objective. [Edit] Nor do I know of a state that handles the deliberate negligence of prisoner welfare as a criminal offence.
The data showing 99% of perpetrators are male doesn’t count forcible envelopment as rape. In order to rape a man a woman has to penetrate him in some way for example sticking a finger in his ass.
Men share more than the possession of a penis, of course. But saying the possession of a penis doesn't make men more dangerous in the face of male rape is like saying that a pistol doesn't make a man more dangerous.
>"Again: if your goal is to protect women in prison, the best way to do that is to advocate for reform that makes prisons safer for everyone. Not by being transphobic, which you're doing instead. "
Perfect is the enemy of good and while it's hard to disagree with the sentiment of "reform that makes prisons safer for everyone ", we have no idea what that actually entails and that's so much of a monumental task that it's basically a non-starter. I feel like the sentiment here is "this wouldn't be a problem if we changed everything, so why don't we?"
> Women in prison are sexually assaulted, raped, and even impregnated by men all the time and have been for years. Those men are guards.
Indeed and this is why feminist organizations, and others with an interest in women's rights and safety, push for policies of only employing female prison guards in women's prisons.
It's no stretch to see why they don't want male prisoners to be incarcerated there too, no matter how such males identity.
If the male guards can't be trusted not to sexually abuse women, how can you expect the same from cohabiting males?
If you read his link, it states the request is for counts, not individual names.
1. A complete and accurate count of inmates who identify as transgender (gender identity differs from sex identified at birth) in the custody of the Washington Department of Corrections [please break this information down by location]
2. Number of inmates that have been transferred from a men’s facility to a women’s facility since January 01, 2021
3. Total number of male persons who identify as female, non-binary, or any other gender identity that are currently housed in a women’s facility
4. Number of inmates who have transferred from a women’s facility to a men’s facility from January 01, 2021 to March 18, 2021
5. Number of female persons who identify as male, non-binary or any other gender identity that are currently housed in a men’s facility
For some the issue so sensitive that even a broad and impersonal question is hugely offensive. And negative intent is immediately assumed of the questioner.
It breaks down the N by location, which... what defines a location here? Is it a state? Is it a single prison? For a small N, narrow location is definitely a de-anonymization factor.
How would knowing "1 Transwoman is currently housed in a female prison on the territory of Washington state" in any way risk causing harm to that transwoman, or help you identify her in any way?
It doesn’t. I think GP is confusing small cell counts in micro data (a real problem) with small numbers in aggregate data (sometimes a problem).
In this case, just a count and prison is not a privacy issue as someone would have to already know the individual is trans to identify them. And that’s the only information contained in the data release.
this FOIA request arbitrarily mixes sex and gender, which actually does show a lack of understanding towards trans and non-binary people (as well as willingness to understand, materialized as fear. fear is the phobia part of transphobia)
so even though GP tried to be accurate and progressive-enough in their admonishment of the ACLU to find a way to have a rational way of expressing and discussing their fear, the people involved have made a malformed FOIA request and are expressing their calcified opinion conflating sex and gender identity.
What does that have to do with denying a FOIA request? Sorry, you used the wrong pronouns, you are denied FOIA? Intent of the FOIA request is irrelevant, otherwise the government could deny FOIA for people who want to make the government look bad, which honestly is probably the case here.
its not about a pronoun, so looks like you're also conflating concepts
no pronouns need to be added or used to correct the malformed FOIA request
it conflates sex and gender, I said what I said, its accurate that it is doing that.
> Total number of male persons who identify as female, non-binary, or any other gender identity
The request would be "Total number of male persons that identify as women". The sex doesn't change, the gender does. The FOIA request would say invalid, or zero, and be accurate, regarding the ones identifying as "female". The "other gender identify" may cover it, but not necessarily. Males identifying as men wouldn't have been transferred. So "other than what"? "Female" is not a gender, unless we are accepting that any arbitrary identification is valid, but would that be grounds for transfer?
But yes that can just say "males transferred", because they remain male.
Its a conditional argument because legal circumstances follow conditional logic. So if it seems obtuse, oh well, thats how it works.
> The request would be "Total number of male persons that identify as women". The sex doesn't change, the gender does. The FOIA request would say invalid, or zero, and be accurate, regarding the ones identifying as "female".
Actually a lot of them now do identity as female, and claim to have literally changed their sex from male to female.
The old idea of "man/woman refers to gender, male/female refers to sex" no longer applies these days.
Not content with colonizing the word "woman", they've now done the same to "female".
This is contemporary trans discourse for you, erasing women and trampling all over women's rights.
from what I can tell, consensus hasn't been made and there is a lot of regional consensus. For example, I see US English honing in on "man/woman refers to gender, male/female refers to sex" while some Commonwealth English not having that exact distinction. On the internet, this makes things very confusing because its not clear where consensus is, and its not clear if someone is saying something exclusionary when they're critiquing the nomenclature. obviously, if you are fearing something that doesn't make sense, this ambiguous regional discourse masquerading as consensus only will validate your suspicions.
"Why the government would want to keep this secret is a good question"
That's an easy one - they always hide anything that could be controversial. This is definitely a hot topic in recent years.
"did people donating to the ACLU realize their money is being used to fight private citizen information requests & defend government secrecy?"
Due to the scope of the ACLU's actions and the variability of its members personal beliefs, it's almost guaranteed that they engage in things that some member disagree with.
> some female prisoners in Washington state wanted to know how many male prisoners had been transferred to women's prisons
This is such an incredibly bad-faith and transphobic representation of the case that I can only conclude you are intentionally trolling. Even if you believe that trans women should not be housed in prisons with cis women, it is beyond bad faith choose the words you chose to use.
I'm not following you at all. From the text of the request, the petitioners want to know: "Number of inmates that have been transferred from a men’s facility to a women’s facility since January 01, 2021" This is almost identical to what I wrote.
I would appreciate it if you would explain to me and others what part of my argument you disagree with rather than simply saying "incredibly bad-faith" "transphobic" "you are trolling" "beyond bad faith" without any explanation of what you think I did wrong or would prefer I do differently.
For what it's worth, I think you are acting in bad faith by calling me names and speculating unkindly about my motives without actually explaining what assertion or argument you object to and why. What you're doing is just bullying.
It's wrong to say "male." You're supposed to come up with some euphemism, like "bedicked." Literally nothing to do with the content of the argument; you're supposed to concede the ground before you step onto it.
While I really prefer the term “bedicked,” what is the term for people with penises regardless of gender? Is there a term that won’t result in someone being called a transphobe?
I’ve heard the term “sex assigned at birth” but that’s not accurate in this situation because I’m interested in people with penises and if someone was born male and had their penis removed surgically I wouldn’t want them included in my population of interest.
> what is the term for people with penises regardless of gender? Is there a term that won’t result in someone being called a transphobe?
No, there is no universally accepted term that won't get you called a transphobe by anyone (correct me if I'm wrong). If terms of the discussion are set by the most extreme genderist views, it's becomes literally impossible to discuss things like male violence against women or sexism in the workplace, because there's no permissible language to describe the groups involved.
I just go with "male" and "female" which are objective, observable facts. If people object to these terms, they are really objecting to having a discussion at all.
> “sex assigned at birth”
Sex is not "assigned" at birth it is observed, frequently well before birth via ultrasound or some other technology. Midwives and doctors don't go round flipping coins that say "boy" on one side and "girl" on the other, this whole concept of "assigned" sex is silly.
While that’s true, it’s such a rare occasion that it wouldn’t really factor into any general terminology. In that there’s not much benefit in altering any words to take into account the 1:100,000 situations where that’s true.
I think it would be like avoiding saying “people have two legs” because some people are born without legs or with only one leg. Yes, it occurs, but not so much as to matter in regards to population generalizations.
> In that there’s not much benefit in altering any words to take into account the 1:100,000 situations where that’s true.
Please explain where you got that number. You are off by three orders of magnitude. About 1:100 of births have ambiguity of gender at birth.
> I think it would be like avoiding saying “people have two legs” because some people are born without legs or with only one leg. Yes, it occurs, but not so much as to matter in regards to population generalizations.
Please explain why you feel that the description "assigned gender at birth" is not apt to describe people who have unambiguous genitals. Yes I understand that the description "observed gender at birth" is a subset of the description "assigned gender at birth", I understand the difference between these expressions. But it seems to me like one expression nicely covers the other expression, e.g. you can say for any birth where gender was "observed" at birth that it was also "assigned" at birth. It seems to me like you are the one stretching language to weird places to achieve political goals.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to observe the sex in most of these cases though, it just takes more than a quick visual check to determine.
The really tricky cases are where the individual has reproductive organs of mixed types, particularly where it involves some sort of genetic mosaicism or chimerism. These ones are where we could reasonably say that sex is only assigned and not observed, but it's very rare. Rarest of all is where someone could be plausibly regarded as both female and male.
Generally, I think it's best to avoid the terminology of "assigned at birth", because it comes with the implication that sex can be arbitrarily reassigned. Something like "incorrectly observed" would be better, in cases where a mistake has genuinely been made.
Exactly this. Even using the phrase 'trans woman' is a concession, implying that these men are a subcategory of women, rather than of men. And that it's possible to 'trans' into this category.
(This is why in radical feminist circles, they are typically referred to as 'trans-identifying males' instead.)
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In the above case, some female prisoners in Washington state wanted to know how many male prisoners had been transferred to women's prisons. The state didn't want to share that information (even in aggregate) and the ACLU defended the state's assertion that this information should be kept secret from the public, including from the imprisoned women whom this policy impacted directly.
Why the government would want to keep this secret is a good question, but the main point here is: did people donating to the ACLU realize their money is being used to fight private citizen information requests & defend government secrecy? How the mighty have fallen.