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31. Jan 2023|15:48 |
Fragmenti no raksta Queer Theory and the Transition from Sex to Gender in English Prisons by Michael Biggs Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, 2021
The new regulations for The Care and Management of Transgender Offenders came
into force in January 2017. This coincided with an increase in transgender prisoners
recognized by the prison service. In 2016 it had begun counting ‘individuals currently
living in, or are [sic] presenting in, a gender different to their sex assigned at birth and
who have had a case conference’. The number nearly doubled from 70 in April 2016
to 125 in April 2017. The official statistics always exclude prisoners with a gender
recognition certificate, like Jones. Although the number of males in the women’s estate
was not recorded, a dissident feminist organization, Fair Play For Women, combed
through the reports of women’s prisons and found at least 13 male prisoners. The
first official figures distinguishing between the men’s and women’s estates were provided
for April 2018. The total number of transgender prisoners was then 139. There were 42
transgender prisoners in the women’s estate: 22 of them reported a female gender identity,
17 a male one, and 3 gave no response. Thus the total number of males in women’s
prisons, adding those with a gender recognition certificate, could have exceeded 30.
The consequences of incarcerating males with women were ignored or denied by
transgender activists and by politicians and officials. Conceivably some assumed that
transgender males, like Hudson, are sexually attracted to men. In fact, many are sexually
attracted to women. Moreover, a disproportionate number had committed crimes of a
sexual nature. From its own research, Fair Play For Women estimated that 41% of
transgender males in prison were sex offenders. This proved to be an underestimate.
Of the 125 transgender prisoners counted by the prison service in 2017, 60 had been
convicted of sexual offenses, including 27 convicted of rape. In the overall prison
population, by comparison, 19% of males had been convicted of sexual crimes and only
4% of females.
The prevalence of sex offenders amongst transgender males has yet to be explained.
Possibly sex offenders had an incentive to claim a transgender identity. One transgender
inmate suggested that ‘transimposters’ sought the status in order to avoid taking the
Sex Offenders Treatment Programme. This programme was open to transgender
prisoners, however, and participation was an advantage when seeking parole. Another
explanation is that autogynephilia—‘a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the
thought of himself as a female’— is associated with other paraphilias that are in turn
associated with sexual offending. There is evidence that men who are sexually aroused by
dressing in feminine clothing are more likely than other men to be aroused by masochism,
exhibitionism, and voyeurism. One inmate referred to the Gender Identity Clinic had
been in and out of prison for three decades for offences such as sexually assaulting a
twelve-year-old girl and downloading indecent images of children. The prisoner wanted
crosssex hormones and surgery so that ‘he would not need to resort to his offending in
order to vicariously experience womanhood’. As a consultant psychiatrist noted, ‘it is by
no means straightforward teasing out the gender identity factors from a sort of fetishization
of preteen girlhood and a degree of sexual masochism’. The prisoner was eventually
prescribed crosssex hormones.
For a transgender male who had not acquired a gender recognition certificate, the
Transgender Case Board could take offending into account in deciding whether to grant a
request to transfer to a women’s prison. Two cases from 2017 show that officials prioritized
the new guiding principle: ‘a wish to respect someone in the gender in which they identify’.
Kayleigh-Louise Woods was sentenced to serve a minimum of 26 years for murdering a
woman, and within months was transferred to a women’s prison, HMP Eastwood Park.
Karen White was charged with multiple counts of raping a woman, along with burglary
and stabbing a man. White was remanded to a women’s prison, HMP New Hall, despite
having previously served eighteen months in prison for sexually assaulting a child; the
prison houses a mother-and-baby unit.
While remanded in prison, White sexually assaulted four inmates (..) After two months
White was transferred to the men’s estate. White was subsequently convicted and sentenced
to life imprisonment.
The Prison Service recorded five additional sexual assaults by transgender prisoners in
the women’s estate. These records exclude assaults committed by male prisoners who
had acquired a gender recognition certificate; the prison service refuses to differentiate
them from females.
It is not fanciful to see White as the apotheosis of queer theory as implemented
in English prisons. Indeed, a Reader in Criminology and Queer Theory at Birkbeck
has vigorously endorsed White’s claim to be a woman, and thereby White’s right to
be incarcerated with women. Lamble presented her argument at a seminar at Oxford
entitled ‘Trans prisoners, sex segregation and the queer politics of safety’; another version
was given at Edinburgh. Despite discoursing at length on ‘the surface and depth
of gender/sex embodiment’, Lamble did not manage to articulate why White should
be classified as a woman. She suggested that White’s failure to attend the gender
clinic should not detract from White’s womanhood, just as a woman who misses an
appointment for a cervical smear is not considered less female. In a similar fashion,
Lamble asserted that the exclusion of White from the women’s estate would require the
exclusion of butch lesbians, because they too are masculine. This false equivalence
illustrates a profound confusion between sex and gender. Although Lamble herself has
criticized the LGBT movement’s deployment of state power to punish hate crime, she
did not mention how White exploited this power to enforce his illocutionary performance.
She also omitted information on White’s behaviour prior to claiming to be a woman. A
therapist with access to White’s record discerned ‘a history of seeking access to mixed and
women’s institutions to find and abuse vulnerable people’, including a psychiatric hospital
where he allegedly raped a young woman. In short, Lamble’s argument demonstrates
how a ‘queer transformative justice perspective’ can transmute an extremely violent and
sexually predatory male into a vulnerable victim deserving protection from the carceral
state and from transphobic feminists. This transmutation is reminiscent of Foucault’s
account of Charles Jouy who ‘almost, partly, or more or less raped’ an elevenyear old girl,
Sophie Adam. Foucault described the encounter as ‘inconsequential bucolic pleasures’,
condemning Adam’s parents and the mayor for their ‘collective intolerance’ in reporting it
to the gendarmes.
From the 1990s to the 2010s, it became successively easier for males identifying
as transgender to enter women’s prisons—first by obtaining genital surgery in prison
(Pilley), then by gaining a gender recognition certificate (Jones), then through performing
femininity (Hudson), and finally by claiming to be a woman (White). These successive
changes brought the prison service closer to the world envisaged by queer theory, in
which ‘gender emerges as the term which absorbs and displaces “sex”’. My argument
is that the convergence of prison policy with queer theory was no coincidence: the theory
motivated and justified changes in policy. Just as theories in disciplines like economics
and psychiatry can remake the world in their own image, so can queer theory.
Queer theory was not the only force driving the transition from sex to gender. The
liberal individualism of human rights was important in the early phase. This discourse
informed a series of legal decisions which erected a new domain of rights around gender
identity. Thus Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees
respect for private and family life was interpreted as requiring the transfer of a violent rapist
to a women’s prison. There is an affinity between the liberal discourse of human rights
and the radical discourse of queer theory: they favour those who are construed as victims
of formal institutions of power. From this perspective, it is progressive to champion the
transgender prisoner contesting the power of the state and transgressing the dominant
categories of society. The power that can be exercised among individuals, such as that
exerted by one inmate over another, is ignored. Thus no consideration was given to
women who would be confined with violent or sexually predatory males. Female prisoners
were invariably treated as an audience obliged to validate the performance of gender
identity.
One of queer theory’s effects was to suppress information about sex which could
falsify the theory. Official data on the number of males in the women’s estate were
collected only after pressure from dissident feminists. These data are still incomplete
because they omit prisoners with a gender recognition certificate, and of uncertain
accuracy because they depend on transgender prisoners (those who have not acquired
a certificate) declaring their ‘legal gender’. Such confusion makes it harder to test the
proposition that gender identity—and not sex—predicts behaviour. One obvious example
is the proportion of sex offenders in the prison population. Queer theory would predict
that males who identify as women would have the same low rate of sexual offending as
females. This prediction is spectacularly false. The recent judicial review confirmed that
50% of transgender male prisoners have been convicted of sexual offences compared to
under 5% of female prisoners.Characteristically, Lamble intervened to argue that this
comparison ‘is tainted by a lack of reliable data’ The unreliability of data is one of queer
theory’s achievements. This case provides a counterpoint to the insight that quantification
is a powerful method for ‘making up people’. It turns out that suppressing quantification
can be equally generative.
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Viena piebilde.
2021. gadā BBC bija raksts, kurā minēts, ka "Between 2015 and 2019, the numbers of reported cases of female-perpetrated child sexual abuse to police in England and Wales rose from 1,249 to 2,297 - an increase of 84%."
Es nenoliedzu, ka šāda tipa noziegumus pastrādā arī sievietes. 84% pieaugums man tomēr liek domāt ko citu, rakstā par cietumiem ir minēts, ka likumpārkāpēji, kuriem ir GRC, statistikā tiek ierakstīti kā pretējais dzimums.
police commonly record self-declared gender identity instead of birth sex; even when the crime is rape.This means suspected and convicted rapists are recorded in official statistics as female if they no longer wish to identify with their male birth sex.
While some police forces said they record the fact if someone identifies as transgender, this information does not appear on government crime figures, which provides only male or female options.
Transgender status is stated only if the person is a victim of transgender hate crime.
Tātad šī statstika nav objektīva un ir bezjēdzīga. Iespējams, ka pēc 10 gadiem varēs vēl vairāk brīnīties, ka sievietes ir mainījušās līdz nepazīšanai.
Otra piebilde.
Rakstā par cietumiem ir minēts tāds jēdziens kā "trans-imposter". Man tas šķiet problemātiski: kā lai pareizi atšķir vīrieti, kas tēlo sievieti, no vīrieša, kas izliekas par vīrieti, kas tēlo sievieti. |
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