It's always about this stuff because it's what the transphobic use to denigrate every trans person with. It's handy, it's their way of trampling over a minority, in a similar way some still do to gay men. The equating of gays with paedophiles, etc.I can't help feeling the point is moot anyway. Why when we talk about trans issues is it always about this stuff? The suicide rate among young trans people is shockingly high, this stuff says nothing about the lives of pretty much all trans people and it's really not helpful. Or relevant. Or humane.
(Sorry, that was not aimed at you xenon, it was a general grump.)
Then shouldn't this argument just be about the management of prisoners who are dangerous to other prisoners then?Ideally the latter. They should not be in a women’s prison. You don’t put paedophiles in a school.
Then shouldn't this argument just be about the management of prisoners who are dangerous to other prisoners then?
Wouldn't this argument equally apply to rapists who target the same sex?
We can have an interesting argument about prisoner safety without getting transphobic.
I agree, and something else I think we should stop doing is jailing people for non-violent crime (shoplifting, fraud etc). They should still be made to pay back what they stole/banned from working in finance or whatever punishment actually fits their crime, but custodial sentences need to be reserved for dangerous people and stop overcrowding prisons with those who really shouldn't be locked up. Then maybe no one would have to share a cell, which would minimise the opportunity for prisoner on prisoner assault.Well male on male sex offenders are segregated of course. I don't think they're in separate prisons. There probably aren't enough prisons. Nevertheless male bodied people who sexually assault women do not belong in women prisons. I mean even more planely so when they commited those offences before transitioning. For fairly obvious reasons... Transwomen who have committed non sexual crimes and been given a custodial sentence should be housed in women prisons IMO.
I agree, and something else I think we should stop doing is jailing people for non-violent crime (shoplifting, fraud etc). They should still be made to pay back what they stole/banned from working in finance or whatever punishment actually fits their crime, but custodial sentences need to be reserved for dangerous people and stop overcrowding prisons with those who really shouldn't be locked up. Then maybe no one would have to share a cell, which would minimise the opportunity for prisoner on prisoner assault.
Kenneth Clarke thinks this as well. Quite a few Tories will say it in private or when they have left power. When in power, they won't address it because they're the Law And Order Party and that means locking people up.Yep. Weirdly I think John major of all people said something like this the other day. Well that we imprison too many people.
Kenneth Clarke thinks this as well. Quite a few Tories will say it in private or when they have left power. When in power, they won't address it because they're the Law And Order Party and that means locking people up.
Not just Tories. Gordon Brown actually boasted about the number of people in prisons going up.
I guess there are (at least) two reasons why people bring up cases like these prison ones.
The first is pure transphobia, from people that see an opportunity to attack a hated minority. This is certainly what a lot of people do in the wider world. We see it all the time in the right-wing press, for example. As such, there is unsurprisingly an assumption, amongst those whose very right to existence is under threat, that when cases like these are raised, this is the reason why. The only viable response to these kind of attacks is one of extreme robustness to the very foundation of the assumptions behind what is being said.
However, I can see that cases like these are also raised by people who are worried, not about trans people, but about bad faith and the exploitation of well-meaning laws by bad guys. They want to know how the system is going to protect them, not from those who are genuinely trans, but from those who aren’t genuinely trans. When this group of people then encounter the defensive response appropriate to the first type of attack, the result on both sides is a lack of engagement and dialogue.
Edie — I think my first question to you would therefore be to ask what exactly is it that you are afraid of? Is it of trans women that have committed serious sexual assaults? Or is it of cis men that have committed serious sexual assaults, and then lie, claiming an artificial trans status for nefarious purposes?
I have follow-ups to both versions of response, but I think the first step is to drill into what it is that you are truly concerned about here.
And getting triggered by "pronouns". Literally everyone's got pronouns!I find it interesting and quite revealing how some people will use the word 'ideology' to dismiss or disparage something that they don't like, or are opposed to, while ignoring the fact that they themselves subscribe to an ideology or ideologies.
Obviously there are limits. But if someone who has committed a crime wants to be known by another name we should just say, "okay", and make that completely seperate issue from their sentence, where they should be held, and so on. If there's a suspicion that people are "gaming the system" somehow, just make it a non-issue.Regarding respecting how people want to be seen, no, I don't think we do always have to do that.
There is clearly an ideological disagreement at the heart of these arguments, which is whether or not, or to what degree, gender identity should supersede or replace sex in matters of law, policy, social rules etc. Feel free to claim either side is an ideology or not, the fact is that the ideological disagreement remains.
Is there something factually incorrect or offensive about what I wrote?Silence, Santino
See belowIs there something factually incorrect or offensive about what I wrote?
'Silence, woman.'
That's such a cogent and thoughtfully crafted post that I'm going to breach my self-imposed (through lack of confidence) embargo on posting on trans-related threads to say great post.The comments that trans people are an ideology or a "quasi-religious belief in a gendered soul separate from a biological reality" reveals the motivation for the post. The huge rates of sexual violence trans women face, usually committed by men who identify as straight, is proof enough that trans people are not some religious ideology but a social reality which is reflected by the way they are treated even by those who might be hostile to their existence.
But you also miss what is often going on which is the reification of an identity based on presumed inherent qualities. This happens all the time and plays a large part in how gender is policed. 30 years ago people would have looked at Bryson and said that's not a man, not a 'real' man anyway. People might have said a woman who killed a child was not a real woman. People certainly said that about lesbians and gay men. It happens in relation to race - see Tucker Carlson's recent comments about how a white man wouldn't fight like that. People denounce other's religion based on their actions and claim no real Muslim or Christian would behave that way.
It might also happen within the group as an attempt to purify it due to concerns about hostile outsiders. I'm sure you could find posts of trans people claiming that Isla Bryson is not really trans. It's happening right now within the LGBTQ community as usually older and anti-trans LGB people denounce young 'Queers' as straight people larping who are not really same sex attracted and thus legitimate targets for abuse and discrimination. It's what's behind Julie Bindel's recent lie that minor attracted people now form part of the rainbow coalition.
There's a huge amount going on here which points to how identities are formed not just by individuals but by society. That all gets lost as soon as you reduce those identities to a simple ideology that can by dismissed as an unscientific delusion that ignores reality and that no-one outside that group plays a role in creating.
If you have a point to make I don't know what it is.
That's such a cogent and thoughtfully crafted post that I'm going to breach my self-imposed (through lack of confidence) embargo on posting on trans-related threads to say great post.
Is there something factually incorrect or offensive about what I wrote?
There is clearly an ideological disagreement at the heart of these arguments, which is whether or not, or to what degree, gender identity should supersede or replace sex in matters of law, policy, social rules etc. Feel free to claim either side is an ideology or not, the fact is that the ideological disagreement remains.
You misunderstood Santino's post. The inverted commas are important.See below
I can't help feeling the point is moot anyway. Why when we talk about trans issues is it always about this stuff? The suicide rate among young trans people is shockingly high, this stuff says nothing about the lives of pretty much all trans people and it's really not helpful.
That's political disagreements though not ideological disagreements. I think if you look at the ideological thinking on either side they're pretty heterodox and fluid. To be honest I have a hard time keeping up with where the GC side is at now. These are not centralised movements with doctrinaire lines. When people start talking about ideologies, it gets my heckles up because it's one step away from outright conspiracy theorising. Do these ideologies not have a real social basis? And I think it's common for people to rally to certain causes together while in ideological disagreement - trans people are in it together not because they share an ideology about gender, but because they are dealing with the same threats to living peacefully in society without battery and with access to trans healthcare.
There is a political ground that's popular in the US and the UK (at least) that sits between that hazy space between conservativism and fascism. Think Nigel Farage here and Donald Trump there as political figureheads. This milieu is all about free speech and the agenda of the "liberal elites" and their "woke ideology" that wants to suppress them ie. the "ordinary people" (ie. white/cis/straight/male people who at best are ignorant and uncomfortable with challenges to their thinking and at worst outright bigots or even organised fascists). I see it all the time both irl and on line. They were galvanised in opposition to feminism some years back and then (in the US in particular), they were galvanised by the Black Lives Matter protests. They've moved on to trans people and environmental activists now and who knows what next. They see their way of life under existential threat. Sometimes the threat is explicitly stated in terms of "cultural Marxism". And no I don't see such people as following an explicit ideology because it's way too messy to be identified as something so definite, but they do characteristically see things in terms of concrete ideological enemies.
This is why I don't think it's good to think in terms of ideology and the clash of ideologies, because in doing so you're dipping a toe into this sort of thinking.