4 ms·

Sure, no problem. Though I would point out that "intact" is also a word used to describe uncircumcised males, without strictly implying that circumcised males a

Sure, no problem. Though I would point out that "intact" is also a word used to describe uncircumcised males, without strictly implying that circumcised males are damaged. I don't think there are enough transwomen in prisons to make any reasonable statistical statement about transwomen in particular being more or less likely to be rapists. And I don't really think the argument is tangential. People with penises are more likely to be rapists than people without them, this is a clear statistical reality. If a large population of people are being held together, historically because they did not possess penises, and are worried about the introduction of someone with a penis (who statistically is much more likely to be a rapist by nature of having a penis), I think the burden is on you to demonstrate that gender identity is a confounding factor in those statistics. And if there isn't a difference between having a penis and not having one in this circumstance, why do we even need to have gendered prisons? With regards to MyHypatia, I was referring to the fact that, in the second half of your comment to which I initially replied, it seemed like you felt MyHypatia did not recognize the direness of the trans situation in prisons. But they clearly do, as evidenced by this from their first comment: > The fear that transgender women have of rape in a men's jail is real

jolux 5y ago
> Though I would point out that "intact" is also a word used to describe uncircumcised males, without strictly implying that circumcised males are damaged. It may be used to describe their foreskin, but I've never heard or seen it used to describe them as whole people. It sounds very odd. What is the negation of intact? You can't really use a word to describe a category exclusively without implying the opposite of the other category. > People with penises are more likely to be rapists than people without them, this is a clear statistical reality. I don't think you can argue this is a clear statistical reality without data about trans women. As far as I know contemporary research suggests sexual assault by women has been historically undercounted. I don't know if the numbers come out similar in the end, but it seems like the kind of thing that is easily colored by social bias. > If a large population of people are being held together, historically because they did not possess penises Is it because they didn't have penises? Or because they weren't men? I don't know of any specific information, but this is an important distinction, because the general perception for a long time has been that men are more violent than women, and I think it's more because of male secondary sexual characteristics (muscle tone and height, mainly) than primary. Would a burly intersex person with high testosterone and ambiguous genitalia who sexually assaulted somebody have been put in a women's prison? Should they be today? > And if there isn't a difference between having a penis and not having one in this circumstance, why do we even need to have gendered prisons? I don't know, but I do think it's worth asking the question! Do we segregate people by gender because it's fundamentally necessary, or because our prison system is so brutal that we can't imagine inmates of different genders living together peacefully? There could very well be science on this subject that I'm not aware of, but on its face the sexual segregation of American prisons seems hard to separate from their brutality and corruption.
- fastball 5y ago
  I think we will need to agree to disagree with regards to "intact" being a harmful adjective to use in this particular situation, but I am happy to no longer use that phrasing if you or anyone else finds it objectionable. I was using it as shorthand for "transwomen with an intact penis" which I think is a fairly accurate way of putting it. Mostly I was using it because that is the phrasing that had been used previously in this conversation and nobody had objected to its usage until this point. To my mind dancing around realities (e.g. saying things like "passed on" instead of "dead") is a strange obsession we have as a society that I generally find tedious and counter-productive regardless of the situation, but that is just my opinion and I am perhaps a bit more direct than average. Sexual assault by women being undercounted does not account for the fact that most estimates put male perpetrators at around 90% of sexual assault cases. It would have to be severe undercounting (in anonymous surveys to boot) to get anywhere close to make up for that divide. Also, unless I am misinformed, I was under the impression that the majority of transwomen share male secondary sex characteristics – I have certainly not seen any indication that transwomen are shorter than the average male and would not expect that to be the case, given that the majority of trans people alive today were not on puberty blockers + hormone therapy before any such primary sex characteristics could do their thing in puberty. Historically, being a man was having a penis. At the end of the day, humanity is a sexually reproducing species and there are two fundamental sexes required for procreation (intersex individuals notwithstanding). For better or for worse, human societies have divided themselves along this line (as best they could judge) since time immemorial. Given this universality, it seems incredibly unlikely that the various discrepancies between men and women (whether with rape or anything else) can be explained away by society / sociological conditioning (and therefore fixed by a change in the same). I fully agree that the solution is to look at the problem holistically and question whether a system which allows for any sex/gender to be raped by any other sex/gender is a system that should be maintained. But as it stands, that system is still around, so we can't just pretend the decisions we've made going into that system are totally irrelevant and now that we're "more enlightened individuals" we can just switch things up without that fundamental revisiting. Said another way, this strikes me as a bit of a Chesterton's fence situation: I don't know exactly why we decided to make men's and women's prisons, but until we've firmly established that "why", I don't think it is sensible to use our 21st century definition of "men" and "women" and apply it to systems that were not made with those definitions in mind.

jolux 5y ago

> Though I would point out that "intact" is also a word used to describe uncircumcised males, without strictly implying that circumcised males are damaged. It may be used to describe their foreskin, but I've never heard or seen it used to describe them as whole people. It sounds very odd. What is the negation of intact? You can't really use a word to describe a category exclusively without implying the opposite of the other category. > People with penises are more likely to be rapists than people without them, this is a clear statistical reality. I don't think you can argue this is a clear statistical reality without data about trans women. As far as I know contemporary research suggests sexual assault by women has been historically undercounted. I don't know if the numbers come out similar in the end, but it seems like the kind of thing that is easily colored by social bias. > If a large population of people are being held together, historically because they did not possess penises Is it because they didn't have penises? Or because they weren't men? I don't know of any specific information, but this is an important distinction, because the general perception for a long time has been that men are more violent than women, and I think it's more because of male secondary sexual characteristics (muscle tone and height, mainly) than primary. Would a burly intersex person with high testosterone and ambiguous genitalia who sexually assaulted somebody have been put in a women's prison? Should they be today? > And if there isn't a difference between having a penis and not having one in this circumstance, why do we even need to have gendered prisons? I don't know, but I do think it's worth asking the question! Do we segregate people by gender because it's fundamentally necessary, or because our prison system is so brutal that we can't imagine inmates of different genders living together peacefully? There could very well be science on this subject that I'm not aware of, but on its face the sexual segregation of American prisons seems hard to separate from their brutality and corruption.

fastball 5y ago
I think we will need to agree to disagree with regards to "intact" being a harmful adjective to use in this particular situation, but I am happy to no longer use that phrasing if you or anyone else finds it objectionable. I was using it as shorthand for "transwomen with an intact penis" which I think is a fairly accurate way of putting it. Mostly I was using it because that is the phrasing that had been used previously in this conversation and nobody had objected to its usage until this point. To my mind dancing around realities (e.g. saying things like "passed on" instead of "dead") is a strange obsession we have as a society that I generally find tedious and counter-productive regardless of the situation, but that is just my opinion and I am perhaps a bit more direct than average. Sexual assault by women being undercounted does not account for the fact that most estimates put male perpetrators at around 90% of sexual assault cases. It would have to be severe undercounting (in anonymous surveys to boot) to get anywhere close to make up for that divide. Also, unless I am misinformed, I was under the impression that the majority of transwomen share male secondary sex characteristics – I have certainly not seen any indication that transwomen are shorter than the average male and would not expect that to be the case, given that the majority of trans people alive today were not on puberty blockers + hormone therapy before any such primary sex characteristics could do their thing in puberty. Historically, being a man was having a penis. At the end of the day, humanity is a sexually reproducing species and there are two fundamental sexes required for procreation (intersex individuals notwithstanding). For better or for worse, human societies have divided themselves along this line (as best they could judge) since time immemorial. Given this universality, it seems incredibly unlikely that the various discrepancies between men and women (whether with rape or anything else) can be explained away by society / sociological conditioning (and therefore fixed by a change in the same). I fully agree that the solution is to look at the problem holistically and question whether a system which allows for any sex/gender to be raped by any other sex/gender is a system that should be maintained. But as it stands, that system is still around, so we can't just pretend the decisions we've made going into that system are totally irrelevant and now that we're "more enlightened individuals" we can just switch things up without that fundamental revisiting. Said another way, this strikes me as a bit of a Chesterton's fence situation: I don't know exactly why we decided to make men's and women's prisons, but until we've firmly established that "why", I don't think it is sensible to use our 21st century definition of "men" and "women" and apply it to systems that were not made with those definitions in mind.