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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. |