[otde]

Here’s what I mean when I asked us to consider perspectives of trans people —- I want you to understand us not just as potential perpetrators of violence here, but also as recipients. Trans women are subject to prison rape at apparently disproportionate levels [1][2] when housed in men’s prisons. Instead of framing this as “is it ethical to move a woman to a women’s prison on the off chance she’s a man gaming the system,” I would consider asking “is it an acceptable tradeoff to keep a woman in men’s prison on the off chance she’s a secret rapist, even if her chances of being raped herself are increased as a result?”

It’s worthwhile to interrogate some of the ways we frame these kinds of discussions, implicitly or otherwise, myself included!

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/transgender-women-ar...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_St...

[whoooooo123]

That's a fair point, and I don't know what the solution is. Thanks for engaging with my post in good faith.

Self-ID in particular is a salient issue in the UK because the Conservative government had plans to implement it, but recently scrapped those plans in favour of the existing system (trans people in the UK can get legal recognition of their gender change but it's a medicalised process that takes one year; the proposed changes would have made it as easy as signing a single piece of paper.) I don't know what the perfect system looks like, but we need to be able to talk about edge cases.

By the way, Karen White wasn't suspected of being a "secret rapist" - she was a rapist. The reason she was in jail in the first place was that she had been convicted of raping women.

[otde]

I’m glad you’re able to see it as an edge case, but part of the reason we get so defensive is precisely because people who typically cite the story don’t want to see it as an edge case.

I used “secret” with a clear intention here, because on the gender-critical side, categorical rejection of trans women from womanhood is a core belief. It follows that if you don’t believe any trans woman is “actually” a woman, that every trans woman is just a man trying to be sneaky, then every trans woman in prison, regardless of existing convictions, is a potential Karen White.

White’s rape conviction is probably the more germane data point in that particular edge case. From there the question might be: how do women’s prisons handle cisgender women with rape convictions against other women right now? What potential problems, if any, would arise if we implemented similar procedures for trans women? How might those procedures help or hurt trans people?

(This might also lead to higher level questions about the efficacy of prisons in a broader sense, but that’s outside our scope here.)

When, as trans people, we see edge cases brought up like this, they’re so often used as a means of depicting us as potential Karen Whites that, to the extent that we even bother engaging, it comes from a defensive place. I hope you can understand that I’m choosing to engage here both because I do see well-meaning people like you on this site and because I think the site needs a counterpoint to the FUD about trans people, even if I dread some of the nastier responses.