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Although the pushback against trans activist policy has come mostly from the right in the US (with some notable exceptions - Kara Dansky of Women's Declaration International, for example), it's a different story in the UK.

Around the mid-2010s, two events occurred in close succession: the Conservative government of the time proposed a policy of gender self-identification, and trans-identifying male prisoner Karen White was charged with sexually assaulting female prisoners while he was incarcerated in a women's prison. He was later convicted and it was uncovered that he'd been sent to the women's prison due to his "female" identity, despite having previous convictions of sexually assaulting and raping women.

The reaction from women was immense, organised on Mumsnet and other forums, mostly by left-wing feminists. After a lot of protest and publicity, the Tories dropped this policy. It was only later on they changed tack with policy proposals that shifted the balance away from trans activism, mostly to draw a line between them and Labour.




Cis women who rape women and cis men who rape men have always gone to prisons aligned with their gender identity. The issue with the normalization of rape in prison is unrelated, and should be solved without throwing trans people under the bus


This ideological argument was attempted back then too, but it's rejected by most people, who see the reality of the situation: men being locked up in women's prisons.

It should be no surprise to anyone that such a policy is very unpopular. Prisons are separated by sex for good reason.

Trying to pretend that some of these male criminals are women just because they said they are is not a particularly convincing argument.


Pretty interesting how being anti-prison rape is considered an ideological argument. But hats off to the real winners of this situation: the bisexual rapists who get to rape no matter what ideology their captors have, I guess.


This might seem clever, but it ignores human biology and sociology.


Sociology of the society as a whole perhaps, but the first three letters of LGBT are not magically immune and the fourth letter is not magically capable.

And physiologically, someone whose outie was surgically modified into an innie is going to have just as many difficulties topping as a natural born woman.


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I remember hearing about some boy who was sent to a prison for a minor offence, was raped, got HIV.

Regardless of your intent, which I cannot know because I am not a mind-reader, what you write here therefore still comes across as if it was ~"it's only bad when pre-op trans women do it".


Please refrain from deliberately misreading my comments.

Sexual assault and rape is terrible, no matter who the perpetrator or victim is. On this, I assume we agree.

The issue here is policy changes that remove one of the most important safeguarding measures to prevent this in the prison system: segregation by sex, so that all male inmates have no physical access to any female inmates.


> On this, I assume we agree.

I am glad. There is no intent to misread, hence my caveat between the commas and the tilde: this is merely how I did perceive it.

> one of the most important safeguarding measures to prevent this in the prison system

I assert, and I thought demonstrated, that this does not in fact seem to be an effective safeguard.


It is an effective safeguard for protecting female prisoners from male prisoners.

There are different safeguards within each prison to protect prisoners from others of the same sex. VPUs for example.


The UK prisons are a total clownshow atm, recently there was a string of female prison guards that were jailed for having sex with (male) prisoners, filming it, and of course smuggling drugs, etc. Also Prisons have run out of space so many offenders were let out early.

- https://metro.co.uk/2024/07/02/inmate-filmed-sex-wandsworth-...

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-67955865


Jesus, sounds like it's just the UK prisons trying to project their awful "justice" system on their own victims. I give the American justice system a lot of shit based on my personal experience with it, but it sounds like police in general are struggling with maintaining their representation of justice in the modern era, especially with how publicized it can get when they fail to deliver.


All government funded systems in the UK have spent the last 14 years struggling, because the UK government of that era tried to get over the recession caused by the global financial crisis in the late 00s by cutting absolutely everything they could possibly cut.




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