Trans women in prison

Returning to an old theme, I was recently asked about whether it was “appropriate” to place a trans woman convicted of multiple rapes in a women’s prison. Even if I assume that the specifics of the instance which inspired the question were rightly reported, which is not a safe assumption given the absurd lies which opponents of trans liberation use as a deliberate strategy, I have to say —

It is more appropriate for that individual to be placed in a women’s prison than it is for …

• … thousands of men to serve as guards in women’s prisons.
• … prison guards of any gender to be so weakly accountable that inmates are vulnerable to rape by guards.
• … inmates in prisons to be so poorly secured that they notoriously vulnerable to violence from other inmates including but not limited to rape.
• … prison rape to be a routine subject of “jokes” in our society.
• … the overwhelming majority of cis women in prison now to be placed in a women's prison, given the cruelty and counterproductiveness of even the best prison as a remedy for the things we use them for now.
• … Ted F*@%ing Cruz to pretend he is motivated by concern for the safety of women in prison rather than motivated by pandering to transphobia for political advantage.

I hope that clarifies my position.

Numbers

Someone dissatisfied with this answer demanded that I speak to how many trans women rape cis women in prisons.

This is question-begging, intended to seed the idea that trans women are prone committing sexual violence. It leaves important related questions unasked.

But okay. Here is an answer.

In the Anglophone world we have a repugnant culture which does not just leave people held captive by the state unprotected from sexual violence, as I noted above, we routinely make meanspirited jokes about prison rape. Clear information is hard to come by.

My interlocutor lives in the UK, where TERFs TERFs have strong institutional support, so I knew the kind of transphobic propaganda they wanted me to respond to. Consider the article ‘Transgender’ Inmates Sexually Assault, Rape Female Inmates at a Shocking Rate, Ministry of Justice Reveals on a website with the TERF-dogwhistle URL WomenAreHuman.com. It quotes the Ministry saying:

Since 2010, out of the 124 sexual assaults that occurred in the female estate a total of seven of those were sexual assaults against females in custody perpetrated by transgender individuals.

Seven sexual assaults is seven too many, but on horrifying scale of rape in the world, one sexual assault every second year is trivial.

Opponents of trans liberation would say that the point is that this demonstrates how trans women commit sexual assault at a higher rate than cis women, and thus present a threat everywhere. The post quotes the rightwing UK Daily Mail saying:

although trans women make up about one per cent of the 3,600 female jail population, they are to blame for 5.6 per cent of sexual assaults

There are a million methodological questions which arouse skepticism about these figures, plus opponents of trans liberation routinely lie outrageously. But let’s follow the logic WAH.com offers for a moment. Two questions come up.

First, the unasked question I alluded to above: how many trans women are raped by cis men in mens’ prisons? WAH.com does not address the question. The best resource I have handy says 1 in 3. So if we link that to WAH.com saying that about 1% of the UK’s prison population of ~3600 women are trans, then if those ~36 women were housed with men, 12 of them would have been assaulted. This suggests that housing those trans women with cis women prevented five sexual assaults.

Second: what about the other 117 sexual assuaults on women in UK prisons? WAH.com does not address those.

Looking at the evidence & arguments presented by opponents of trans liberation I must conclude that they do not actually care about preventing sexual assault in prisons. They are looking for a “concern” which sounds plausible if you don’t think about it, in order to justify their bigoted disgust at trans women and turn it into policy which hurts trans women.

A familiar pattern.