Scottish prison service rules allowing male-born transgender offenders to be housed in women’s prisons have been suspended and are now under ‘urgent review’. The women who raised concerns about this issue for several years have thus been vindicated; their persistence and determination in raising those concerns should be noted and acclaimed.
The Scottish development follows cases that have grimly caught the public eye across the UK. Last week’s conviction of the double rapist known as Isla Bryson was followed by reports that the violent sex offender ‘Tiffany Scott’ (born Andrew Burns) was heading for a female jail – solely because he says he identifies as female.
These miserable stories – and the tortured language used to report them, including phrases such as ‘her penis’ – are precisely what a number of women have been warning of. And while trans sex offender transfers to the female estate are now on hold, there have already been too many reports of women in that estate being intimidated and worse by other male-born criminals who say they are female.
The fact that it has taken such vivid cases for those warnings to be accepted and acted on is revealing.
Those warnings are longstanding. Very nearly five years ago, I wrote here about worries that accepting self-identified gender at face value could lead to policies and practices apt to be exploited by predatory men:
To those who worry about this, the prospect of women’s prisons, refuges and toilets being open to a person who was born male and now says they are female and who is entitled to enter those women-only spaces solely on that person’s self-declaration of gender is profoundly troubling. They fear that such rules could easily be exploited by men who were not genuinely conflicted about their gender but simply wished to gain access to women’s spaces and rights for some other malign purpose.
I wrote that not because I had any special insight or foresight. It was because I had listened to and read the work of many impressive women who saw this all coming. They came from different backgrounds and perspectives but all were willing to confront a truth that too many people shy away from: abusive men will do anything, go to any lengths and exploit any situation, to abuse women.
What has now been shown to be happening in Scottish prisons surely proves that sad point once again, as did the similarly grim case of Karen White in the English system.
They all said that self-ID rules put women in prison at risk from abusive men. They were all right.
The only surprising thing about all this is that some people are surprised by it. The Scottish government and a number of media commentators alike seem to regard the revelation that sex offenders might be willing to disassemble and cheat as novel: who could ever have imagined that a man willing to commit rape could then stoop so low as to lie about his gender? Hence that ‘urgent’ review of something that has been repeatedly predicted for many years by many women.
I apologise for the fact that this list isn’t comprehensive, but the names of those women should be recorded as they are – sadly – vindicated. Nicola Williams of Fair Play for Women. Ruth Serwotka, Judith Green and many others from Woman’s Place UK. Kate Coleman from Keep Prisons Single Sex. Journalists Janice Turner, Sarah Ditum, Helen Joyce, Helen Lewis and – all hail – Julie Bindel. MurrayBlackburnMackenzie. For Women Scotland. Some writer from south Edinburgh called Jo. Mumnset.
They all said that self-ID rules put women in prison at risk from abusive men. They were all right. They were all ignored, for too long.
Why? Well, the first reason is that most people don’t care enough about women in prison. We overlook them and the evidence that they are very often victims of crime and abuse. As a group, their welfare and interests are too often neglected, in public debate and by the people who take part in that debate. I sadly include myself in that: my think-tank has done some work on female prisoners in partnership with the excellent Centre for Women’s Justice, but not enough.
Another aspect of misogyny is at play here too. Women’s voices do not sound as loudly as men’s in national conversation. Those warnings about prisons were not taken seriously enough because they were often made by women. I have no doubt that if more men had been saying those things earlier, it would not have taken so long for the problems of self-ID in prisons to be accepted.
A final reason may have sex-based origins, but is part of something even bigger too: optimism bias. We just don’t like confronting the truth that some people are willing to do very bad things. Think over every failure of safeguarding you’ve ever read about, every headline about abusive celebrities, priests, teachers and the rest.
What’s common to them all is that afterwards, the people who might have picked up the clues that it was happening just couldn’t believe that such a thing was going on, or couldn’t bring themselves to believe it. It was more comfortable to believe that everything was basically OK, and would continue to be so.
As I say, this phenomenon isn’t just about abusive men and safeguarding. We’re all collectively too inclined to optimism, to assume that because things have been OK in the past they will continue to be so in future. Investors habitually assume past performance determines future results. Democracies routinely assume that they won’t slide back into tyranny. Closing our eyes to dreadful possibilities is easier than accepting the truth: that bad things can and do happen, often because of the things that men do.
This is about as unoriginal a thought as you can get, of course. Long before the Gospels record Jesus as saying ‘prophet is not without honour, but in his own country,’ the Greeks told stories of Cassandra, fated to predict the future but not be believed. That story had to be about a woman, and it’s just been repeated, yet again, over prisons and self-ID.
It’ll be no consolation to them, nor to the women who suffered fear and abuse in the prison system. But as that ‘urgent review’ finally forces the country to accept the truth, today we should acknowledge and thank the Cassandras of the sex-gender debate.
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