If you haven’t muted or blocked me on Twitter, you’ll be aware of my more than passing interest in the interaction of women’s rights and the rights of transgender people in various contexts. In an atmosphere of continued unjust vilification of women seeking to have responsible discussions on the reconciliation of rights, I make no apology for this. Occasionally, threads come tumbling that are more suited to a long form format, so I’m hoping to gather up some of those here in a bid to give them some semblance of coherence and file them away before I finally flounce out of twitter for good with or without the proverbial petticoat. I’m more of a smoking jacket person anyway. Or dressing gown, as it’s less glamorously known.

Below is a response to the management of prison policy in the context of two prisoners recently transferred to the women’s section in Limerick Prison. Public discussion is scarce and there is an intensifying reluctance on the part of the media to highlight concerns in relation to failures regarding the rights and dignity of all concerned. More on that later.

Here, I respond to a statement from Limerick Feminist Network who responded to The Limerick Leader who responded to an article by Gript, a conservative leaning publication and one of few outlets that has addressed an issue mainstream and Left leaning press has all but abandoned save for directives to Be Kind and warnings on usage of incorrect pronouns. The statement from Limerick Feminist Network is as follows:

The vulnerability and immense trauma suffered by the young person concerned is established and not in doubt. No-one is disputing the need for appropriate protection, treatment and rehabilitation. Where the conflict lies is the interaction of certain mental health diagnoses with a crude and unrefined gender-based policy, how that policy is subsequently balanced with equality legislation exemptions for females on the basis of sex, rather than gender, and managed.

These conflicts have been raised by the Chair of the Law Society Criminal Law Committee who has publicly stated the Gender Recognition Act has “placed the state in an impossible position with regard to transgender prisoners”. Necessary checks and balances to ensure these balancing of rights were not undertaken prior to implementing the Gender Recognition Act in 2015.

I shared the anger over the leak from the Garda data base (Pulse) system giving details about this individual and believe it was a breach of confidentiality, however there is enough information available in the public domain through the court report that falls within the bounds of reasonable reporting guidelines.

We know there are currently two male-bodied individuals housed in the women’s prison. Neither has undergone hormonal treatment or gender reassignment surgery.

The first individual obtained a Gender Recognition Cert whilst in custody. It is an administrative formality that requires no supporting evidence or period of notice for changing ‘gender’, which is currently used interchangeably with ‘sex’. This individual is serving a prison sentence for a series of sexual assaults and child cruelty. Due to the clear and present risk posed to females, the person is accompanied 24/7.

The second individual continues to make explicit threats to rape and murder women. The Tavistock Gender Clinic made a determination based on a clinical assessment that the individual was not exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria but is suffering a mental health trauma. Despite this, the individual is housed in the female prison. Due to the clear and present risk posed to females, the person is accompanied 24/7.

The request to be housed in the women’s facility was made by both individuals and granted solely on having a Gender Recognition Certificate. This simple administrative action carries considerable power and continues to override all other concerns. These include the protection, treatment and rehabilitation of females.

It is generally understood and accepted that female prisoners are among the most vulnerable women in society. Many are survivors of physical and sexual violence. This is borne out in multiple and reliable evidence and studies.

A number of dismissive responses have been forthcoming:

“There is already violence in female prisons anyway“

This is a fact but drawing a false equivalence between internal female violence and male sexual violence against women is disingenuous and a form of gas-lighting.

“They are always locked up & accompanied“

Whatever about the inhumanity of solitary confinement, it is contemptuous of women to dismiss the impact of the presence of male bodies in a female only facility, particularly when they are acutely aware of the nature of the crimes committed and threats posed by these individuals. The interaction of this with their pre-existing trauma from sexual and physical violence is clinically catastrophic, re-victimising, cruel and an indignity forced on them in the name of dignifying the perpetrators only.

“There were no concerns before the Brit TERFs got wind of it”

TERF is an acronym for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists and has its roots in radical feminist discourse with overlaps into lesbian feminist clashes concerning gender and inclusion of trans women. It is generally recognised as a slur in contemporary discussion and deliberately deployed as such against a diverse group of women with competing feminist views who share broad and legitimate concerns about gender self-ID policy ranging from definitions of sex, gender, woman and lesbianism, parity in sport, legally protected single-sex spaces, data collection, and child safe-guarding. (I’ll return to the preposterous suggestion Irish women are no less diverse and ‘in service’ to British women another time.)

A number of women and men have been forthright in raising concerns about these policies for over three years. Women in particular have been vilified and ridiculed despite addressing the issues dispassionately on an evidence basis. Mounting evidence on the impact of the mental health of females from male-bodies in prison is emerging, particularly from Canada and the UK where multiple assaults have occurred. The need to challenge media that exploits these rising incidences to sensationalise, stigmatise and negatively stereotype a minority community remains, but is not incompatible with the responsibility to interrogate the implication of policy and how policy is exploited by those presenting as members of that vulnerable community.

“No-one should be in prison anyway whoever they are“

That’s a very laudable objective shared by many but it is independent of appraising the impact of current prison policy on both women and trans people.

“Our feminism is inclusive and free from the fatal grip of Catholicism” etc.

That from the same people who also claim…

“It should be left to the authorities on a case by case basis“

It is the context of historical and contemporary contempt shown to women by the state through various public policies from health, pregnancy and reproduction, the justice system and sexual violence, and state incarceration, that demands all policies are interrogated and scrutinised in a way that appraises how the needs, consent, and protection of women are met.

Clearly the state is not to be trusted to be ‘left’ with managing these policies. As evidenced by the concern from legal quarters, prison reform bodies, victims groups, and swathes of women across Ireland who are asserting their right to speak up and challenge it.

Screams of TERF and trojan horse are sounding increasingly outlandish. Concerns do not undermine the rights of trans people. They raise the flaws of policy and how it is ultimately failing everyone involved here including trans people.

Feminism is not an Irish movement. It is a global movement concerned with the liberation of women from patriarchal systems including overt rejection of physical and sexual violence in all its manifestations. Like Irishness, it transcends national boundaries & permission for participation.

The feminism and humanity in the urgency to address these issues responsibly speaks for itself and requires no further explanation or defence. It is not at odds with the humanity and compassion for any vulnerable individuals involved. That means everyone involved.

1. The term ‘cis privilege’
2. The imposition of narrow gender roles derived from regressive stereotypes based on either sex
3. The social construction of gender
4. The material reality of biology
5. The consequences of conflating both and allowing gender to trump sex
6. The sex-based violence against women including: femicide, global poverty, rape, sexual violence, FGM, period poverty
7. The biological basis of global female oppression as opposed to the cause of it – a claim no-one is making
8. The deliberate misconstrued meaning and application of biological essentialism 
9. The sex-based gender roles imposed on males and females from birth
10. The appropriation and exploitation of intersex people in the gender debate against the express will of the minority of people with intersex conditions (who are all male or female)
11. The systemic and institutional discrimination of trans women in areas of employment, education, health, welfare, and safety
12. The systemic and institutional response to that discrimination in the form of thought-terminating slogans and self-serving moral marketing that fails to address any of it
13. The subordination of the needs and voices of trans men in all public discourse to those of trans women
14. The limitless and all-encompassing ‘definition’ of transphobia
15. Distress experienced by males due to gender dysphoria (as opposed to sympathy)
16. Ditto autogynephilia
17. The continued ignoring of this condition and failure to adequately factor it in the mix
18. Male perpetrated violence including transphobic violence towards trans people
19. Comparatively lower rates of homicide among the trans population than females in the UK and globally
20. The murder of Black Trans Women by males predominately in the US & Latin America
21. The internal and external factors that condemn many Black gay men to sex work in the States
22. The blanket acceptance of sex work as career choice
23. The lack of evidence supporting safe use of puberty blockers on children
24. The long-term effects of puberty blocker use: infertility, medical dependency, osteoporosis, loss of sexual function. All irreversible
25. The rates of destransitioning
26. The unprecedented acceleration of transitioning among young females
27. The walk-out of 40 clinical staff from Tavistock Clinic due to safe-guarding concerns
28. The BBC documentary reporting on same
29. Necessary child safeguarding and protection protocols in all spheres of public life in response to male-perpetrated sexual violence and need
30. Ditto single sex space and the multiple reasons for their evolution including safety, privacy, dignity of everyone including the need to enable women, men and children participate in public life
31. The trauma from violence and sexual abuse on women that requires them to have access to single-sex therapeutic single-sex spaces and programme for them and their children
32. The objective clinical evidence this is based on
33. The housing of males with sexual assault offenders with the most vulnerable women in society: female prisoners
34. The ensuing incidences of sexual assault and violence towards female prisoners by trans identifying males
35. The mandatory recording of male-perpetrated sexual violence in the offender’s preferred gender
36. The mandatory rule that female victims of male-perpetrated sexual violence must refer to the perpetrator in their preferred gender in court
37. The biological basis of same-sex attraction that is inherently and uncompromisingly discriminatory based on – biology and legitimate genitalia preference. Ask a Left straight male who he can and can’t have sex with
38. The imposition of gender-based sexual attraction that undermines this in the name of inclusion that renders lesbians ‘bigoted’
39. The erosion of sexual boundaries
40. The implications on necessary precise data required to plan resources, services, and measure discrimination through deliberate conflation of sex and a nebulous idea of gender
41. The significantly increased upper body muscular strength, lung and heart capacity males retain compared to females following puberty irrespective of hormone intervention
42. The implications of this on maintaining level-playing field for women’s sports, for which resources and opportunities are already in short supply
43. Ditto women’s positions in spheres of public politics, culture, decision-making, and representation
44. The introduction of education on gender to young children based on regressive sex-based stereotypes
45. The introduction of protocols that inhibit parental knowledge of young children ‘socially’ transitioning in schools with no recourse to intervention
46. The unprecedented infiltration of every public sector department, private sector ‘diversity’ awareness, and 3rd sector institutions by trans political lobbying groups including Stonewall & Mermaids
47. The threat of job loss & actual loss of employment if staff do not fully submit to these political beliefs
48. The 2004 Gender Recognition Act
49. The Equality Act that includes sex as a protected category alongside those who have undergone gender reassignment surgery
50. The single sex exemptions the law permits
51. The limitations of the GRA and the rationale for these
52. The right to condemn organising politically exclusively as a female sex-class as abhorrent and something to be approved of by males. Female is a distinct meaningful political category that depends on political organisation for the safeguarding of rights and protections
53. The anger of Left males brutally administered among women highlighting the above under the guise of solidarity with trans people
54. The silence from these same men to all the above issues regardless of platform size, celebrity status, or occupation
55. The failure of these men to challenge themselves and their own sex class  on the ongoing perpetration of violence against women and transphobic violence
56. The assumed right of these men to direct the terms of feminism under the guise of solidarity and inclusion
57. The continued framing of international bounds and concerns that transcend feminism, nationality, left/right axis of politics as a uniquely British right-wing phenomenon
58. The ‘right’ of twitter to ban users (many women) for stating biology is immutable while allowing on-going abuse and threats towards women (from mainly men) for stating that their sex matters to their life experiences
59. The wilful determination to interpret this as respectable corporate responsibility than the political lobbying it is and the implications of same on democractic engagement and discourse
60. Glinner
61. Bono

The first problem with pulling the plug on the blog was wondering what to do with all the posts. What worth had they, if any, in the annals of internal monologues, and for whom. The desertion by question marks from that sentence consistent with the indifference everyone reading it feels.

As a compendium of places my monologues visited during a specific time and place, was there any point in letting them gather dust for future surface-blowing. Having spent most of my independence as a fugitive from carrying much baggage other than psychological, I had come to regret the periodic replenishing of recycling boxes with letters and diaries and scrapbooks and Red Bulled essays. Some origamied into qualifying for forensic lab assembly requiring tweezers and expert witness hands. Others discarded whole with a cavalier flick beloved of anyone adept at undervaluing exchanges between 20 somethings with no money, no direction, and no surrender to the game being up.

The second problem with pulling the plug on the blog was wondering who could blow the dust off. Laundering them through Twitter as re-usable currency for communication was all very well but their shelf-life eventually expired along with representations of everyone and everything in them. If they were dating site profile pics, the hair-lines would now be dots on the horizon of their owners foreheads hovering above thinned top lips hanging like interval curtains over teeth gone for another costume change.

A few teeth are missing. The two front teeth just this weekend. She is above my fluctuating waistline now and firmly under his wing. I thought of asking him to store these posts under lock and key for her to peruse at a legal drinking date should fate intervene and dispossess me of an opportunity to hand them over myself. Hand over myself. My other selves. The half-distracted self. The middle-distance thinking self. The one she senses is somewhere else.

She mightn’t be interested in where I went anyway.

The third problem with pulling the plug on the blog was being caught short of a place to be and ending up in Twitter. Again. And again. And again. Twitter is other hells of other selves and an elusive sense of self. The HD self. The short distance sprinting thinking self. No roaming in the gloaming through the byroads of the subconscious for a long-form to and fro. Just interrogation lighting with torchlights drawn at 20 paces along the keyboard.

The fourth problem with pulling the plug on the blog is wanting to plug it back in. Sometimes.

She unfastens grave-stoned tinsel tracing frames.
Silver: Like the anniversary celebrated within.
Green: What she was on her wedding day in hindsight.
Green: What she feels if she thinks about it long enough.
Red: The colour of two delicate unlit candles
held in by a girdle of tape slowly limbo dancing
the air on the mantlepiece; Having swaggered in upright
in 19 and 61 when presented as a gift for their first Christmas
from her Mother who, for the last two weeks has been adorned
with plastic holly in the hallway without her consent.
It doesn’t match the pillbox tilted in the same direction
as the eyes made at her new husband sitting comfortably below her.

Cherry-picking the tree, off with glittered globes from Sainsburys.
2 for £1.50 in the January sale of 2014.
Sainsburys being the one shop that do those bulbs for the lights
hanging over paintings in the only gallery she has ever curated.
The harbour at Port-na-Blagh from the main road, on the bend,
pre-planning blight, pre-life insight.

A concentration of boxes lining the valley of Glenties;
recognisable only to the discerning eye. And at that,
incapable of revealing his true origins to her
no matter how intense her gaze lingering on it.

An elegant woman, overdressed to be wandering a meadow alone,
before ending up in the living room on account of the flowers
she sniffs matching the carpet perfectly.

Upwards towards preserved artifacts of her children’s childhood:
Chain-gangs of looped paper rings, misshapen stars,
the clear glass bear from Dublin. Or was it Derry?
Tiers of nearly tears until she reaches the inscrutable angel
presiding somewhat judgmentally over her domestic domain.
Refusing to look down over unabashed nakedness at eyes
coming up for her in the hope they’ll both see the next.

And you’re to blame *cups ear*  ….you give… that’s it…..a bad…

Beautiful singing, dot comrades. Like an Enya album speeded up to 45. Irresistable that tune, init?  A bit like the keyboard.

I hope you’re all doing grand and the sunlight isn’t causing too much of a nasty glare on your screen. As if internet enthusiasts haven’t enough to contend with. Sleep. Other people. Driving. Eating. The barriers are many but we battle through. Some of us towards other forms.

I’ve carried out the threat of tinkering beyond the long-form rambling into a more disciplined method with a new location for same. It may be short-lived. It may not. Shrugs. All visitors, snoopers, lurkers, and Enya/Chris deBurgh very welcome.

http://www.fourleggedwords.com

🙂