Written By Classical Liberal
Male-born transgender prisoners were first allowed to request a transfer to women’s jails in England and Wales in 2016. The risks of this policy were made clear only one year later when a convicted rapist was moved to women’s prison HMP New Hall and sexually assaulted two female inmates. Karen White identified as a woman but was still legally a man and had not undergone surgery. White was jailed for life in 2018 by a judge who branded her a ‘highly manipulative predator’. Despite the history of such assaults, in July 2021, the courts decided that ultimately the rights of transgender women trumped the rights of natal female prisoners.
Cultural Marxists must be jumping for joy as they watch second and fourth-generation feminists tear each other to pieces over what it means to be a woman. In her own words, ‘Amy Jones’ (a pseudonym) was ‘sexually assaulted in a women’s prison … by a fellow inmate with male genitalia’. The prisoner who sexually assaulted Amy at HMP Bronzefield in Ashford, Middlesex, is referred to as ‘J’ because she cannot be identified for legal reasons. J is a transgender woman with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). And, therefore, is referred to by the female pronoun but still has male genitalia.
J was serving a sentence for a serious sexual assault on a child. Yet, she had secured a coveted job as a cleaner at the prison gym where Amy also worked. While Amy was in the gym’s lavatory block, J assaulted her in 2017. ‘What were the officers even thinking, letting her clean toilets in which women would be in a state of undress and alone? Why was there a child sex offender with a penis cleaning the toilets of the gym in a women’s prison’? asks Amy. I would also ask why do they have gyms in prisons? Yet another ridiculous waste of taxpayer’s money, if you ask me.
‘When J went for a shower, the prison put a sign on the door saying that no one else should enter because they knew it would upset the women if they saw her naked, but J objected to this and said it was an infringement of her human rights’, recalls Amy. ‘She said, “I am a woman and I want to shower with other women”’. Yet another example of workers at the sharp end trying to exercise common sense and being soundly defeated by the PC Brigade because their bosses are too cowardly to back them up in the face of all of this nonsense.
Indeed, J, wielding the threat that any criticism of her behaviour would be considered ‘transphobic’, was permitted concessions that would not be granted to other women prisoners. For example, although rules state that most cosmetics purchased from outside the prison are banned, J was allowed to have toiletries brought in. As Amy explains, ‘Trans prisoners claim they have to disguise their beards and want to look feminine so they are given special privileges’.
Amy heard that J had been sent to the segregation unit as punishment for not taking the medication that prevented her from getting an erection, ‘which begs the question: why was she still allowed around us’? After the assault, Amy told a senior prison officer what happened and asked, ‘Why a child sex offender with a penis was allowed to clean the women’s toilets in the gym’? The officer replied: ‘Everyone deserves a second chance’.
Amy observes that ‘Sex offenders are master manipulators, and if they sniff vulnerability they target it. At the same time, they are going on about their human rights and scaring the prison officers into looking the other way’. Surely, our culture has lost its moral compass if convicted child abusers are allowed to lecture the rest of us on human rights!
This month Amy learned that she had failed in a judicial review challenge to the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) policy concerning allocating high-risk transwomen prisoners – including sex offenders – to female prisons. Amy’s lawyers argued that the law currently discriminates against women prisoners and that the Government failed to consider the provisions of the Equality Act, which allow for certain single-sex exemptions, permitting men and women to use separate facilities in particularly sensitive circumstances. In his ruling, Lord Justice Holroyde accepted Amy raised genuine concerns. Many women would ‘suffer fear and acute anxiety if required to share prison accommodation and facilities with transgender women with male genitalia and convictions for sexual and violent offences against women’. He also allowed that the statistical evidence showed the proportion of transgender prisoners previously convicted of sexual offences was ‘substantially higher’ than for non-transgender men and women prisoners.
Between 2016-2019, 97 sexual assaults were recorded in women’s prisons. Transgender prisoners without a GRC committed seven. It is unknown whether transgender women with a GRC committed any because they are disregarded in Government figures. Once again, the Government conveniently forgets to collect statistics that might show how bad things are. But, Holroyde concluded that the statistics ‘… are so low in number, and so lacking in detail, that they are an unsafe basis for general conclusions’. The judgement recognises that housing transgender women with convictions for sexual assault creates a real risk but considers that the prison service has put measures in place to manage that risk. However, the evidence seems to belie Holroyde’s optimistic claim. Amy’s case against the prison service was bolstered by evidence from another prisoner at HMP Bronzefield who also complained of assault by J.
Yet, the prison service didn’t report the assaults by J on either woman to the police. According to Amy, ‘The staff turned a blind eye to this behaviour. They protected themselves and didn’t speak out as they were worried that they would get into trouble because of the trans policy in prison; a policy which doesn’t consider the impact on women prisoners’.
HMP Downview in Banstead, Surrey, established a separate wing for high-risk transgender women with a GRC. Initially, three transgender women were housed there, but since then, all have successfully challenged their allocation to the wing as ‘transphobic’. All are now back in the general prison population—yet another example of common sense being defeated by political correctness.
Indeed, if we cannot put transgender women in men’s prisons because that puts them at risk of harm, putting them in separate wings has to be better than putting them in the general population of women’s prisons, posing an obvious threat to natal women prisoners.
Of course, this is small beer! In March 2019, thirty-four transgender women without a GRC were allocated to a woman’s prison. The number of transgender prisoners with a GRC is thought to be in single figures across the prison population.
But it is an extreme and obvious example of a more significant point: how political correctness defeats common sense and creates a country where decent people suffer ... Independence Daily.
