I'd say the important question is, 'what is the rate of self-declared trans women raping cis women going to be once every man before a court figures out that he can get put into women's prison with a single unfalsifiable lie?'.
Bad stuff happens in prison, we're all agreed, the issue I see is that a much worse outcome is entirely predictable but many people are afraid they're committing a hate crime unless they blind themselves to that eventuality. And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
If the volume becomes sufficient why not put trans women with trans women? This is only a problem while the numbers are small so your scenario where this ends in a deluge of scheming rapists would backfire.
> And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
Good question - this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid and if they are sexually assaulted in prison at a hugely higher rate (13x)[1] that's acceptable because we need to stop a hypothetical legion of rapists.
> this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid
Exactly. They aren't. A 'trans woman' is a type of man and needs to be treated as such when his demands and desires come into conflict with women's needs.
I don't know, why didn't the judge do that in this case? Why not do that with trans athletes? Seems like an obvious solution, yet it wasn't taken. That's the kind of willful blindness (or weakness to social pressure) I'm pointing to.
>this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid
It really isn't. Some people really have gender dysphoria (I was one so I'm not just talking out of my ass here) and some people really have strong incentives to claim they have gender dysphoria when they don't. Both can be true. What led to this story is that we can't bring ourselves to investigate whether one particular person could be lying.
The problem I'm pointing to isn't that some people have gender dysphoria (some do) or that it's a difficult condition to accommodate (it's really not) or even that our medical system is shit at treating it (it is, but that's a separate problem). The problem is that elements of our culture prioritize helping victims over preventing victimization. Because of their awful health outcomes, trans people today are held as a special class of victim and their desires - not their health outcomes be it noted - are held paramount. Well meaning people would rather prevent trans prisoners today from being raped than ciswomen prisoners tomorrow, despite the obvious asymmetry of suffering in those scenarios. Trans people matter more because they're suffering more, never mind how much suffering would be caused by 'simply affirming their right to exist'.
That's what mainstream curricula are teaching and that's what my moral sense objects to.
> Well meaning people would rather prevent trans prisoners today from being raped than ciswomen prisoners tomorrow, despite the obvious asymmetry of suffering in those scenarios.
What asymmetry is that? I provided a statistic for the abuse trans women currently suffer in the system, but no one else has provided anything but anecdotes and appeals to some sort of common sense. It, and correct me if I'm wrong, feels like you're giving a similar sort of special reverence to cis women who suffer sexual assault than trans.
To be clear, I think sexual assault is bad all around and I hate the idea of abusers slipping being enabled, but it's somehow acceptable that many many trans women are abused instead of the potential for even one more cis woman to be sexually abused in prison than there already are (let's not kid ourselves here, scads of abuse already happens).
I guess the answer to this particular trolley problem for many people is to not even consider pulling the lever because it's 5 trans women but one cis.
If there were no gender segregated prisons, ciswomen's rates of assault would be like transwomen's today, I don't need to point to a study to convince a neutral bystander of that. Given the percentage of women who are Trans in the US is about 1%, the trolly problem at hand is more like 1 trans woman and 99 ciswomen. Damn right I wouldn't consider pulling that lever.
This story is the result of two widely accepted proposals:
-Transwomen belong in women's spaces.
-The only moral response to someone coming out as trans is to affirm their new identity.
If you agree with both proposals, and many people do, that means in practice you believe one transgender woman is worth >99 cisgender women. No one says that out loud, but prioritizing victimhood means that's the calculus they deal in. Adding more exceptions to problematic examples like this one doesn't address the root problem with that hierarchy of values.
At least in the UK, data from the Ministry of Justice shows that trans-identifying male prisoners are significantly more likely than other men to be incarcerated for sex offences.
There is also no data whatsoever indicating that if a man calls himself a woman, then he poses any less risk to women than other men.
I agree that prisons need to stay sex-segregated, or revert back to being so where authorities have made this abominable ideological error of incarcerating men in the women's prisons.
You're saying by allowing trans women into prisons 99 ciswomen will be raped for every trans woman right now (who are sexually assaulted at 13x the average prison population)?
If we want to have this discussion, please provide some actual data about the rate trans women sexually assault women in women's prisons.
You keep conflating transwomen with men lying about being transwomen. Do you not believe that a male rapist would lie about being a transwomen if it gave him access to a large population of vulnerable women?
Bad stuff happens in prison, we're all agreed, the issue I see is that a much worse outcome is entirely predictable but many people are afraid they're committing a hate crime unless they blind themselves to that eventuality. And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"