Fact or Fantasy?

By: Aphra

17 June 2024

In an interview in March this year, in response to a question from Ash Sakar about whether the housing of trans prisoners in the female estate puts women prisoners at risk of assault, Professor Judith Butler said that until people identify how much at risk female prisoners are from guards and from other women prisoners, we should not even be asking the question.

Noting the incidence of sexual violation in prison, and largely ignoring non-sexual violence, she referred to the need for all violators to be treated equally and for the violated to have appropriate avenues of recourse.

She deployed the standard argument used to deny or to minimise the risk posed to female prisoners by transgender prisoners – i.e., transwomen are more likely to be victims of sexual assault in male prisons so to protect them from a real harm they must be housed in the female estate where they will not be any greater threat to female inmates than is already posed by guards or other women.

Butler goes as far as to describe claims that transwomen might cause harm to female prisoners as, “fantasy”.

Firstly, being at risk of sexual violation in a male prison does not automatically mean transwomen will pose no threat to female inmates, and secondly, harm is not confined to sexual violation. (1)

Even if there was zero harm from genuine transgender prisoners, the elephant in the corner of the room is gender self-identification, and more importantly, opportunistic gender self-identification.

The definition of transgender has been stretched so wide, the criteria for being accepted as genuinely trans grants scope for the malign and predatory, the vexatious, and the frightened to claim to be trans in order to be transferred to a women’s prison.

People who know about prisons are aware that doing time isn’t just usually scary, brutal and dehumanising, it’s also tedious.

People must either be ideologically blindfolded or very stupid not to see the potential for male prisoners to seize an opportunity to do their time somewhere less scary and dangerous than men’s prison or simply to mess with the system to relieve the boredom. Gaining access to women is an added incentive.

The point surely is, if women in prisons are already at risk of sexual violation and non-sexual violence from guards and other female inmates, why risk making it even worse by effectively granting a range of predatory, vexatious, or frightened men a “get out of male-jail free card”?

If trans prisoners are at greater risk of sexual assault in the male estate, (2) why not agitate for safe spaces for all vulnerable prisoners and call for a halt to all unnecessary incarceration.

Another point the likes of Professor Butler should consider is, if people wanted to bring the gender identity movement and the wider “left” into disrepute, what better way to do it than to allow some dangerous men who have claimed a spurious trans status, into women’s prisons and make their inevitable transgressions widely known?

In the interests of balance, it must be said that until the gender wars heated up, many of those now shouting about trans prisoners didn’t spare a thought for women in prison. If they win this fight, odds are they’ll retreat into not giving a damn again.

Some of them, being fully paid-up members of the law-and-order brigade, would throw more poor women into even worse prisons given half a chance.

It’s the same scenario with people who are tearing out their hair over drag queens reading stories to kids in libraries (3) but who barely register the annual holocaust of young lives lost as a result of war, hunger and disease.

People who’ve never questioned where the water in their swimming pool or toilets comes from, ignore the millions of black and brown women who walk miles every day carrying water to keep themselves and their kids alive.

People who’ve never noticed, supported or participated in women’s sport suddenly have a trenchant view on access to it.

Principled feminists should call out all forms of political opportunism. Allowing ourselves to be diverted into internecine warfare which serves only entrenched power is bad enough; using the situation of vulnerable people as a weapon while having no intention of effecting systemic change which would materially benefit those people, is beyond the pale.

By no sensible measure are trans people ­– even roping in the worst of the weirdos who are claiming to be trans – the greatest threat to the world’s women and children. Those who believe or who claim they are, may be transphobic.

Similarly, women who questioned the gender identity orthodoxy, by no sensible measure were deserving of the vitriol, threats and misogynistic abuse that was and still is heaped on them by people purporting to be trans allies, and which drove many women into the waiting arms of the secular and religious right.

The actions of both extremes in this nasty little war were and still are being driven by fear and anger, and in some, by revulsion – a toxic mix of disgust and hatred.

Sometimes those ancient drives serve us well in warning us away from things that can harm us; sometimes they distract us away from even greater dangers.

In terms of the major influencers on both sides there are some whose celebrity, business, academic or political career rests on a firmly stated public position and they can’t retreat from it without putting their career investment at risk.

There are some who just don’t like losing.

The most dangerous are those who have a financial/academic/political stake in the game, who hate losing, and who are either in the grip of fear and loathing or are adept at whipping it up in others.

Notes:

• (1) There are acts of non-sexual violence, and the psychological damage caused by living under the threat of it.
• (2) A great many men are at high risk of harm in prison, eg. gay men, young men, disabled men.
• (3) This was a tactical and PR blunder which also begs the question whether the people who thought it was a good idea were politically naïve, stupid, or fully cognisant of the inevitable backlash, given the fuel that paediatric transition had already added to the fires of the looming auto-da-fe.

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