When it comes to the conversation of ‘women’s prisons’, and keeping women within the prison system safe; you’ll quickly find yourself sword in hand, knee-deep in a war zone of moral panic, dehumanising rhetoric, and pearl clutching paranoia. Here be an army of slick propagandists wringing their hands, weeping crocodile tears, and acting as if the world is about to collapse, because a comparatively tiny handful of dangerous male inmates, have grifted their way into women’s prisons. And I agree. Stories of those like Isla Bryson are outrageous, and expose ideological blind spots within the carceral and political systems... But what our fine scholars of ‘women’s safety’ don’t (or refuse to) understand, is that the real terms danger women face in women’s prison, does not come from trans women, nor “men in wigs” like Isla Bryson. Because the predators they fear are already inside women’s prisons… because they are other women. Yup. For all their talk of ‘the facts’, clout-farming perforative high-iq pseudo intellectuals have chosen to ignore the biggest fact of them all – that female prisons have *even higher rates* of inmate sexual assault than male prisons do. The prison system mixes all kinds of dangerous people together, and nobody says a thing. Yet one dangerous male inmate wearing a wig enters a women’s prison, and it causes a sneering symphony of shrill whines and smug jokes, as the conversation nose dives yet further into ignorance. Whether it’s JK, Piers Morgan, or the Trigger pod boys, I simply do not believe any of them truly care about women’s prisons, or women’s safety within those prisons; rather they care about turning the trans issue into a prop, or a gag, for lack of more original ideas. I’m tired of it, the exceptionalism of such people, who blabber on, seemingly thinking their unlearned and virtuous diatribes are acts of ‘bravery’ to be treasured by the rest of us. But they are not. In fact, such people are no less ignorant, nor ideological, than those they point and laugh at. So what’s missing from the discussion of ‘safe spaces’, what about dangerous women, and is it time we included male prisons within the conversation too?

2024-05-22