Is it necessary for libraries to stock gender critical books?

This blog came out of a conversation with a librarian friend who was talking through the rationale for pushing back against the insistence of some anti-trans lobbyists that their books be stocked on free speech grounds.

Don’t let them draw you onto their turf

The thing about free speech arguments, so beloved of the far right, including those in the “gender critical (GC)” camp, is they only work from within their own, flawed, internal logic. We get firehosed with these arguments almost daily, so we don’t always see the holes. This can make them difficult to contradict, until we realise that free speech is often not the relevant or salient issue in the discussion, and it is not really what is being argued for.

Note, too, that right wing free speech ideology contains a contradiction, which is essentially this:

“What the left are saying is so dangerous and harmful, free speech arguments should not apply – they must be silenced at all costs”.

So, there is an inherent belief that free speech should have limits. The self-same people who claim a right to say what they like about trans people will also talk about “dangerous trans ideology”, social contagion, the need to stop schools from talking supportively about trans kids, and so on.

It’s worth spotting this hypocrisy. Are we really talking about the principles of free speech? Is that really what they are championing? It’s worth a closer look.

A library doesn’t stock all books

This applies to books and libraries, but it also applies to giving people a platform. Because unless a platform or library is equally open to all books/all comers, then there is a selection process. It’s no longer possible to call this a free speech argument if speakers or books are being chosen over other speakers or books. To not be given a place in a library or on a platform is a consequence of selection and choice, not censorship.

And then, a belief that you are owed a place on a platform or in a library becomes a question not of free speech but entitlement.

What’s the selection process by which a speaker is invited to speak? we might ask. What are the criteria, say, if it’s an academic space? A justice-oriented space? A political space? A news program? What credentials does the person need? How is that decided? Does the institution have a responsibility to fact-check before information is included?

Likewise for books: which books are included here? How are they selected? Which books are rejected and why? Are books independently verified and fact-checked?

“A lot of the books we need for our courses aren’t in the library” X*, a trans student tells me when he finds out I’m writing this blog, frustrated that his university library just ordered multiple copies of a GC, explicitly anti-trans book that has been much criticised for misleading and inaccurate content.

Is the anti-trans book required reading for something? Given the general lack of academic rigour behind GC thinking, why would it be? If not, why is it necessary for it to be in the library? Or is the library just including it to come into line with a populist movement targeting trans people? Or for fear of being plastered over the pages of the Daily Mail as an example of the dangerous leftist urge to control discourse?

“How did this particular book meet the rigorous inclusion/selection and peer review processes an academic institution requires in order to maintain academic standards?” is a good question to ask.

Academic rigour

From two decades analysing the flawed logic of “gender critical (GC)” transphobia in particular, I have learned one thing, and that is that GCs regurgitate the same arguments over and over, leaning on the same tiny number of flawed or misrepresented research, all of which has long been superseded and debunked by rigorous academic processes.

What in my experience GCs don’t do is respond to trans academia; the enormous body of research into trans experiences and healthcare, or any of the thorough and rigorously academic data that entirely deconstructs and dismantles their worldview. I have hundreds of relevant academic papers on my hard drive alone – the amount of study and evidence base supporting what I write and train about cannot be understated.

The reason they get away with this lack of academic rigour and engagement without simply being laughed out of the room wherever they go is that trans academia is niche, academics in the field are rarely given a platform to alert the world to good data and arguments, and so it’s possible to maintain public ignorance and for GCs to delude the world that they are making good arguments.

For folks that use the term “critical” a lot, they don’t seem very aware of what it means or what critical academia requires of them.

They are not having an academic discourse because they are not engaging with the vastly superior quantity of academic work that disagrees with them, critically or otherwise. Meanwhile, trans academia has no choice but to discourse with them, and that at least has honed and refined our own feminist arguments to a highly sophisticated level. Which in turn is why trans academia is so respected within feminist academia as a whole.

How do you categorise anti-trans books?

The next question to think about is the one of labelling. Where do you put such books in a library? How do you introduce such speakers? Do you forewarn your audience that, like climate change deniers, GC thinking is disputed by the vast majority of experts in the field? That there is a huge body of work debunking their ideas? That they are widely seen by many as a hate group, organised and well funded lobbyists who disseminate nothing more than propaganda?

Is there a section for propaganda in the library? A section for what is widely considered to be bigotry? Who assesses the material before it is categorised, and how much do they know about the topic? Would you put a book that was widely considered to be homophobic in the LGBTQ+ section? If a book must be in the library, then where should such a book be? Arguably not the LGBTQ+ section if its stance is so profoundly anti part of the LGBTQ community. Equally, these texts cannot be considered categorisable as feminist if their central focus is not on women, but on trans people (and explicitly stripping their civil rights from them). It’s an absurd thought that in 2023, with all the moves forward in discussion of intersectional feminism, that we should be even contemplating a campaign against a marginalised group’s civil rights as “feminist”. Meanwhile, many thinkers, including Judith Butler, have pointed to the ways GC campaigns are damaging to women.

It might be worth also asking this question: In the year 2023, would a library take seriously an academic book about women written by men, and disagreed with by most women? A book about gay people written by straight people, that most gay academics vehemently oppose? What does it mean when we choose not to afford trans people as a group their own voice within academic thought, but allow cis people to pronounce loudly on trans experiences? This could be described as infantilisation.

Of course, if a culture pretends GCs themselves are marginalised, then it legitimises giving them support, facilitating and spreading their views. Which in turn allows people not to lend trans people their support and strength at a time in history when trans people are by all metrics a dangerously beset and scapegoated marginalised group. Cis GCs are not marginalised on the topic of trans issues because they are not trans, whatever their other marginalisations might be. Being widely disagreed with is not in and of itself a marginalisation.

Book burning isn’t what you think it is

Of course, the other thing we know about libraries is they are book burners. I remember as a kid my librarian mother putting me in the back room and getting me to stamp “cancelled” in a pile of books they’d put into retirement. It was the 1970s, but apparently cancel culture was already in full swing. Books get destroyed constantly, because they’re falling apart, because nobody wants them, because the knowledge in them has been superseded, and sometimes, because they are, in light of better understanding about the world and about minorities, too appalling to put on the shelves.

There is nothing a “gender critical” writer has written that hasn’t been superseded, disproven, overturned or thoroughly debunked. They rely on the subject area being sufficiently niche to mean most people don’t know how flimsy their arguments are.

Putting a gender critical book in a library of up-to-date knowledge is akin to having a book from the 70s that says autism is caused by “refrigerator moms” or homosexuality is a psychological disease. There is a need for such books to be held somewhere as a record of what people used to think before we knew better, but again it’s important to think about where, and how they are presented.

At best, it’s like housing the 2^nd edition of a science book when we’re now on version ten. No, it doesn’t matter if the copies of the old book are burned, we’re not trying to suppress anything, we’re just keeping up to date. Science is full of things we used to think and now know are wrong. Science is also full of academics who cling to outdated ideas out of ego while the world moves on around them. When they are given undue power and platform, as we’ve seen with the anti-vaxxer movement, they can create havoc.

I sympathise with people who’ve been lured by social media algorithms and firehosed with misinformation and propaganda about trans people, but there are also flat earthers and anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers out there in great numbers, and we don’t hold any moral responsibility to pander to or treat with reverence such beliefs, especially when we’re bound by notions of academic rigour or accurate reporting. An idea being popular or politically expedient does not make it right or hold more academic weight.

The frustrating thing about comparing people who pulp obsolete knowledge or burn their own unwanted books when millions of copies exist in the world is that it misunderstands what Nazi bookburning was.

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was specifically a repository of knowledge about LGBTQA+ people, where the openly gay academic and campaigner Magnus Hirschfield formalised (for better and worse) the way trans people were viewed and medicalised in the twentieth century. The Nazis burned the library there and knowledge that was at the time more current and up to date than anything the world had seen was lost entirely.

This is what censorship looks like – the state withholding information from the populace that has not been disproven or superceded, but is objected to on ideological grounds.

in the exact way that GC ideologists go all-out to suppress knowledge of trans issues in schools and the media, and insist that their academically dubious and well disproven dogma is always represented as equally valid in any discussion of trans experiences.

There are appropriate places to put these books

Eventually GC books will be pulped because it’s inevitable that their lack of rigour and coherent argument will be seen through., and nobody will have any use for them, because they are not useful.

Such books need to be preserved in collections that want to hold an accurate history of any movement of thought and ideas. In such collections, e.g of the history of feminist discourse, an insert alerting the reader to issues with the contents is of course appropriate. An institution is allowed to both stock a piece of writing it opposes, and position itself in relation to that writing. But such material only belongs in very specific libraries.

Even there, neutrality in the face of oppression is neither desirable nor required.

My friend tells me about a library that carries accurate transcripts of Hitler’s speeches, which are valuable historical documents, particularly given propaganda rewrote what he said. An appropriate institution can house these works and still have a stance on what it thinks of their contents.

Perhaps, it is more universally understood that Hitler’s speeches are wrong and harmful. We probably won’t have people persuading us that it’s a matter of free speech that copies of these transcripts are stocked in every public library. We don’t have the BBC wheeling out a Hitler expert to justify his philosophy as a counter to every relevant news item.

But how can we possibly be living in a free society if someone is not making a case for Hitler’s views whenever a relevant conversation arises?

If free speech is to be the argument then I’m sorry, it applies as much to Hitler’s speeches as it does to Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock and Sheila Jeffries.  

Is this an appropriate place to house this discussion; are we seeking to be a complete and definitive record of a particular branch of knowledge, or are we selective? If selective, then free speech arguments do not apply.

If we are selective, how do we select? My justice principles state we should centre the marginalised group affected by such discourse in advising how we produce a fair and accurate representation of the salient points and issues.

And for those outraged that I’m comparing the ideology of people who currently campaign against trans people’s civil rights with fascism – I could and Judith Butler has, but in this case that’s not the argument I’m making at all. I’m saying that if your argument is “we’re right, we’re good, and we’re not like Hitler” that’s a very different argument than “we, along with everyone else including Hitler, have a right to free speech, therefore you should platform me/stock my books/include my arguments on Newsnight and so on, in exactly the same way as you should include Hitler’s.”

Take this seriously before it’s too late

We’ve seen before the damage done by institutions treating inaccurate, ideological information with more respect, weight and rigour than it deserves, thus giving it an endorsement of robustness it did not warrant. We saw this with the BBC over-platforming Nigel Farage and moving the Overton window strongly in favour of anti-immigrant sentiments that drove the Brexit agenda. We’ve seen it globally with climate change denial being platformed over and over until it is now too late to save much of what would have been saved had the world concertedly and robustly taken climate change seriously when we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that it was a problem.

The trans community are in the heart of a cultural emergency. Those of us who work with large numbers of trans people have a sense of the size of the cost from society unnecessarily wringing its hands over whether it is safe to allow us to exist as who we are.

Libraries, media, and those that are booking speakers can and do have a moral responsibility to ensure they are not signal boosting harmful misinformation, academically obsolete arguments and pure propaganda. Unless it’s their job to ensure that all views are aired and heard equally, and they are making no selection process, the concept of “free speech” is just a red herring.

*name redacted for anonymity

With great thanks to B, my librarian friend, for inspiring this blog, for reading it through, and for providing the following resources for librarians:

LGBTQIA resources for library workers

Book 28 is a small LGBTIQ+ library

Podcast On Trans Issues

“Trans and non-binary activist, counsellor, trainer and writer Sam Hope is a founding member of Nottingham Trans Hub and the author of the book _Person-Centred Counselling for Trans and Gender Diverse People: A Practical Guide_ (2019). We speak to them about the dangers facing the trans community in Europe, and how best to offer meaningful support and solidarity.”

I gave this interview back in August, but it still feels relatively current, referencing GRA reforms, JK Rowling, and the situation for trans people across Europe. It took place prior to the Government’s decision not to reform the Gender Recognition Act in the UK. 

With thanks to Ibtisam Ahmed for giving me the platform to speak up for my community.

Cis allies versus transphobes – when and how to engage

This blog came out of a conversation with an ally about when and how to engage with anti-trans campaigners. Here are my top tips for how cis allies can be helpful in the fight against transphobic hate.

Do not boost the signal

Many transphobes do what they do in order to get attention and social media hits. Every time you hate share a transphobic article, the person who wrote it is winning, no matter how outraged you are. Do not assume that sharing an article and commenting how bad it is does damage to the writer.

If the writer or poster’s goal is simply to get good media coverage, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Social media algorithms make being outrageous and controversial online lucrative. People piling in on them will only help raise their profile and make them look like a plucky hero to those who share their hateful views.

In addition, arguments gain traction the more they are heard, even if they are being refuted.

Example: the people who still believe climate change isn’t real have almost all heard good evidence that it is, but the controversial climate change sceptic arguments still have traction exactly because they are controversial, and therefore get a lot of attention in the media in the way a well thought out argument just will not. It doesn’t hurt that, like transphobia, the right-wing media likes to signal boost those arguments.

Another example of the success of being controversial is anti-vaxxers, who use an approach called fire-hosing. According to Lucky Tran in the Guardian:

“Firehosing inundates us with so many wild opinions that it becomes exhausting to continually disprove them. In this scenario, reality is reduced to positioning and who can sell their position best.”

Transphobes are particularly good at this tactic, and the allies and trans people quickly become exhausted by the process of continually providing evidence that refutes their claims. Because the media still uncritically shares false information about trans people, the propaganda gains a similar veneer of truth to climate change skepticism. It doesn’t matter that there is a near consensus about the genuineness of trans experiences and the importance of granting them safety and civil rights. It doesn’t matter that there is zero evidence that trans civil rights endanger cis women in any way. It only matters which voices get signal boosted, just as the climate skepticism angle has been signal boosted despite a near consensus from scientists about climate change.

When you share or comment on an anti-trans article, you are unfortunately helping signal boost that article. If you create discussion beneath an article a friend shares on Facebook, you are also signal boosting that article.

Just don’t, okay?

Consider the impact on your trans friends

Transphobes, and that includes self-styled “gender critical” feminists, terrify a lot of us. Many of us have been genuinely traumatised by the hatred and vitriol that these groups target us with. I personally experience PTSD symptoms whenever I witness the hate of gender critical feminists on or offline, due to previous, awful experiences that have accumulated over a couple of decades. When it is vicious and transparently hateful it is bad. When it is polite, clever and manipulative, with undertones of gaslighting and dog whistling, it is far worse.

There is nothing worse than an abuser who is attacking you in plain sight whilst others look on and do not realise you are being attacked. The most toxic are people who share quite “reasonable concerns” that are in fact clever and false arguments that undermine our civil rights and incite others to enact violence and abuse against us. The ones that play for sympathy towards the transphobe and paint the trans person asking for civil rights as an aggressor or worse, a predator. The ones that manage to convince others that they are being victimised even by us pointing out their transphobia.

Abusers are very good at getting people on their side by in turns being charming and playing the victim. They are even better at driving their victims up the wall until they break and lash out.

When our friends treat these individuals as reasonable and engage in debate with them they are offering social inclusion to transphobes in a way that is often unwittingly socially excluding towards us. Here is a space our friend may well be holding or curating, is certainly participating in, where whether or not I should have civil rights is seen as a suitable topic for debate, rather than a given. Things are being said there that may activate my PTSD symptoms, while the cis folk in that space have no concept of the impact of this discourse. If I dare to participate at all, it’s at the risk that I may become upset or rattled, and be told by my supposed ally that I am “not helping my cause” because I haven’t been sufficiently polite to the person who is enacting structural violence on me oh, so subtly but devastatingly.

Because there is a small but vocal left wing and feminist contingent of transphobes, we are much more likely to encounter these people during activism or amongst our friends. When cis allies tag us to draw us into a discussion, or comment on a public post that then appears in our timeline, or share their experiences or an article where we can see it, they contribute to our trauma. They may think that they are demonstrating their allyship, they may think that our input would be useful to counter what has been said, but in reality they may simply be adding to our distress whilst signal boosting hate.

Imposing sanctions

If arguing with transphobes is not helpful, what then can we do to counter hate? Well, one thing we can do is impose sanctions. Hold people to account for their behaviour. There is a reason why hate- mongers insist so often on their “right to free speech” – they want to be able to do what they like without consequences, and use the “free speech” argument to shut down anybody who tries to impose sanctions against them.

That’s because sanctions work.

No platforming, deleting comments from our timeline or groups, telling people we’re not prepared to stay in their presence if they continue with their hate, calling for somebody to be fired, banning them from their social media platform, unfriending them or blocking them for their views, asking people to boycott their event, are all actions that transphobes will complain very loudly about. That’s because they’re effective. Responses need to be proportionate, but often our responses take into account the heat that will fall on us for our actions more than the magnitude of the offence. Transphobes often get away with their behavior because they’re natural bullies and people are afraid to square up to them, remaining bystanders to their bullying behavior.

They will call the consequences of their actions censorship (it isn’t) and shout about an “all powerful trans lobby”, but nevertheless we must persist in making sure that people are materially and socially accountable for their actions. We should not be afraid of harnessing social power or gaining enough power to have an equal place in society. The only goal here is to gain civil rights and to shut down arguments that have been disproven over and over again to those who’ve bothered to do their homework. We have to make hate speech something that has consequences for the person making it rather than the people experiencing it.

When a friend says something transphobic, start by sending them a private message. Ask them if they knew that what they shared or said was transphobic and ask them to take it down. If they come back and disagree that it is transphobic, ask them if they would be willing to take part in an accountability process to explore this. Tell them that it is not for them to decide whether something is transphobic, that it is trans people who get to decide that. Remind them they are unlikely to know as much about trans peoples’ experiences and civil rights as trans people do. Remind them that there is a concerted anti-trans campaign going on at the moment and they might well have fallen victim to this campaign of misinformation, but the facts in favour of trans people’s civil rights are friendly.

If the person refuses to reconsider their actions, consider unfriending them and, if their hatred is entrenched and they are an active campaigner against trans civil rights, consider letting mutual friends know about the situation. When we publicly risk our own standing by siding with the bullied rather than the bully, it can be frightening, but it also signals to our fellow humans, who are, after all, pack animals, that maybe it’s time to stop the bullying.

Sanctions must be proportionate to the crime, but the impact of campaigning against trans rights and legitimacy should not be underestimated. Hate speech is the foundation of escalating violence against marginalised groups and needs a zero tolerance response.

Educate yourself and others, and speak up

Although trans-positive articles will never have the reach of those negative articles that get hate-shared everywhere, you can inform yourself and others by following and sharing the work of knowledgeable trans people on social media – random names off the top of my head include CN Lester, Munroe Bergdorf, Tavis Alabanza, Alok Vaid-Menon, Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, Ben Vincent, Ruth Pearce, Christine Burns, Natacha Kennedy, Kat Gupta, Paris Lees (me!!) . . .

Make sure you know a hell of a lot before wading in on an argument – gender critical feminists are wiley, and can have folks believing up is down. Poor arguments make the situation much, much worse. Maybe 9/10 times I see a cis person arguing with transphobes, they actually don’t know enough not to get badly tripped up.

Here are some stock phrases to help you out rather than getting tangled in an in-depth “debate”

“Trans lives, identities and civil rights should not be up for debate.”

“Trans civil rights hurt no-one, anyone who says differently is peddling misinformation”.

“The pervasive idea that trans women pose a threat to cis women is a fiction that de-centres the very real violence trans women experience.”

“De-legitimising trans experiences and undermining their civil rights is an act of structural violence”.

If you’re a cis man, and you’re arguing with a cis woman about women’s safety and feminism, please also consider that you might not be helping at all just by virtue of being a man. Engaging in an online argument only serves to reinforce the pretense of victimhood of transphobic women who claim that trans rights is some sort of trojan horse for men to impose themselves on women. It’s not, of course, but when it comes to the finer points of feminism and navigating feminists discourse, very few cis men know enough to do this well, and I do not want my trans-positive activism to come with a side-order of accidental misogyny or the optics of a cis dude brow-beating women and telling them what’s good for them. Just as the likes of Graham Lineham haven’t been overly helpful to the gender critical cause when he browbeats trans inclusive feminist women online and tells them how they should do feminism properly.

Better still, share positive, trans inclusive feminist articles (such as the ones I share on my Facebook Page) in spaces where they’ll have impact and simply delete any anti-trans comments. Don’t forget that if you block someone, they can no longer reply to a thread you started in a group, so consider blocking people who make hateful comments if you don’t have admin rights to delete their comments. Respond briefly and firmly, report them to admins, and block them.

Consider having a policy on your own groups and timeline that does not allow speech that opposes marginalised people’s civil rights, and learn why those toxic, pervasive but sometimes innocent-sounding “whatabouts” do just that. Learn about the links between supposedly feminist/leftist transphobes and the far right, and examine the ways in which their arguments overlap.

 

As long as whether or not trans people should have civil rights is still considered a matter for debate in polite, socially aware circles, trans people will continue to suffer and die under the weight of this structural violence. Dehumanising speech is the underpinning mechanism for the rise in hate crime and alarming suicide statistics. It needs to stop.

Creating a lie: How trans women are portrayed as predators

First of all, a quick apology to my readers – I’ve been out of the habit of blogging while working on my upcoming book, Person Centred Counselling for Trans and Gender Diverse People 

But today I was running a trans feminism workshop with a lovely group of Feminists over Fifty and it reminded me I’ve been neglecting this blog, so I think I might write a few quick blogs on trans feminist subjects, because there’s still so much misinformation out there that has a life of its own.

Today’s blog is about claims that keep surfacing online that trans women show “male patterns of violence” and how that trope has managed to be perpetuated without evidence, and has contributed to a hostile climate where reform to the Gender Recognition Act has stalled. I also look at the community in general and what we do or don’t know about trans offenders. Please be warned, there are some very upsetting contents ahead.

Content warning: discussion of violence, including sexual violence, transmisogyny, prisons, criminality, systemic oppression of trans people, marginalised groups in prison statistics

Telling a good story

When creating a lie the first ingredient is some good storytelling. So many TV and film murderers are trans-coded; gender non-conforming or outright trans representations, as in Insidious 2, Pretty Little Liars, Silence of the Lambs or Psycho. The portrayals are so frequent and run from blatant to subtle. Next time you watch a crime show, look out for little clues and hints at a trans narrative for the villain, especially if the crimes are sexual.

This means we are primed to believe that trans women are violent, predatory, often disturbed, and of course perverted, because we are told the story over and over until it becomes a trope we don’t even notice we are absorbing.

The offering up of trans (and queer) characters as villains is of course a deliberate ploy of the patriarchy – it distances perpetrating behaviour from cishet men, enabling the rape and violence culture that allows cishet men to get away with their crimes far too easily.

The idea of the deviant trans woman is also rooted in misogyny, in the idea that women are inferior sexual objects, so someone society sees as a man wanting to be a woman must have warped sexual motives. This has also led to some truly terrible and entirely debunked, inappropriately sexualised theorising about trans women from clinicians and transphobes alike that is much discussed elsewhere. No such equivalent theories exist for trans men, despite the huge similarity of trans men’s and trans women’s experience, because misogyny infects society’s view of trans women in some truly alarming ways.

Lies in the media

Ingredient 2 in creating the lie of “trans woman as perpetrator” is evidenced in the national presses’ ability to throw around a completely fabricated story that Soham murderer Ian Huntley is transgender (he’s not, never was, never said he was).

There have been a lot of these “anonymous source” stories about trans people recently. Often “anonymous source, terrified of powerful trans lobby, tells completely unsubstantiated and alarming tale of a Bad Thing a Trans Person Did”. In the case of Huntley, the anonymous source, a fellow prisoner, simply made up the story Huntley was trans and it was widely reported in the media, and taken up in the Twittersphere, particularly by high-profile writer Graham Lineham.

Because journalists protect their sources, unscrupulous media can use this route to publish pretty much any fiction they please without any accountability. There are no  repercussions for the source or the writer beyond the need to print a small print apology if the truth comes out. Proving something did not happen when it is an anonymous story about an unnamed trans person in an undisclosed location is even harder, and when we complain about such (common) stories being unsubstantiated gossip presented as fact, the complaints are not upheld.

Presumably, there is a financial incentive too to provide a juicy story that captures the “concerned about trans rights” zeitgeist.

It doesn’t really matter that the Huntley story has been retracted, because in 20 years there will still be transphobes repeating the story, some in good faith, some in bad – trust me, urban legends about Terrible Things A Trans Person Did never die, they just get more and more embellished.

There is no evidence, despite what some people might claim, that trans women (or trans men, for that matter) are in any way more dangerous than cis women, but it does not matter – people believe awful stories about trans people because they have been consistently groomed to do so.

Fake statistics

Ingredient 3 in the lie was a scandalously manipulative claim by Fair Play for Women (FPFW), a group campaigning against trans civil rights, that 41% (60 out of  a total of 125) of trans prisoners are sex offenders. The truth, as revealed here is that the figure was derived by entirely spurious means, but yet again it was widely, and uncritically, reported.

If FPFW’s figures were correct, they would signify that there are only 125 trans prisoners in the UK in total. That means that for a total trans population estimated to be between 200,000 – 500,000, trans prisoners would be a surprisingly small group comparative to the general prison population of 179 per 100,000.

Just to clear things up a little, that 60 sex offenders that sounds so alarmingly large as “41%” is 0.01% of the estimated trans population – one in ten thousand.

I would expect the trans prison population to be proportionately higher for complex sociological factors I explore in the next section, just as it is for other oppressed and marginalised groups. And yet if FPFW’s stats are right and that 60 sex offenders figure is indeed out of an 125 total trans prison population then that’s astonishingly low. Of course, if you read the BBC’s fact-check on the figure all becomes clear – most trans prisoners are not recorded and there is a reason why serious offenders are recorded as trans while minor offenders are not.

So FPFW and all the media outlets who shared it effectively lied about the proportion of trans sex offenders, stirring up people’s existing prejudices about trans people.

The truth, that there are 60 sex offenders out of a completely unknown but certainly much higher total is less impactful, though. There are of course sex offenders in every group of humans in existence – there are an estimated 64,000 female sex offenders in the UK according to the Guardian, for instance – that’s one in every 500 women. We do nothing to keep these sex offending women out of toilets and changing rooms.

I guess that if the government are as bad at recording stats for minor LGB offenders we could just as easily (god forbid) produce a similarly manipulative statistic for the proportion of recorded lesbian or gay sex offenders, and start a debate about LGB people being a danger. Which would be horrific.

And this is where the existing lies enable the new lie, and where social marginalisation plays its part too – if someone produced a statistic that 41% of middle class white men in prison were sex offenders, few would believe it and it wouldn’t be in the interests of our increasingly right wing media to share it.

So what would we expect the trans prison population to be?

If it was recorded, which it isn’t, there are many factors that might make trans people more likely to end up in jail. Members of many marginalised groups are over-represented in the prison population, not under-represented. Factors that might influence incarceration rates include high homelessness statistics (25% of trans people have been homeless) low income (60% of trans people earned under £20,000 in this UKgov survey) and high unemployment (35% of trans women and 43% of trans men were out of employment in the last year).

Mental health service users are vastly over-represented in the prison population. If you look at the Trans Mental Health Study 2012, 76% of trans people have taken antidepressants, 31% had accessed a community mental health team. Rates of mental health experienced were: Depression 88%, stress 80%, anxiety 75%. 36% scored as having major depression. We know from a landmark study published in The Lancet among others that poor trans mental health is directly linked to the appalling way society treats trans people.

Then, let’s remember that marginalised people who are the victims of violence are often themselves arrested for that violence.:

“Women marginalized by their identities, such as queers, immigrants, women of color, trans women, or even women who are perceived as loud or aggressive, often do not fit preconceived notions of abuse victims and are thus arrested.” (Source: Jacobin)

The government LGBT survey reported that in the last year 25% of trans people had experienced domestic violence, and the Trans Mental Health Study 2012, showed that, 38% experienced physical intimidation and threats for being trans, 19% had been beaten up for being trans, 14% had been harassed by the police.

The report Out of sight, out of mind? Transgender People’s Experiences of Domestic Abuse reports staggering stats for victimisation of trans people: Abuse from partner or ex – 80%; emotional and transphobic abuse – 73%; Controlling behaviour – 60%; physical abuse – 45%; sexual abuse 47%. In addition, 37% of respondents said that ‘someone had forced, or tried to force them to have sex when they were under the age of 16’ and 46% had experienced some other form of childhood sexual abuse.

This is not the subject at hand, but these statistics bear out the reason trans people desperately need to be included in safe spaces, refuges, services, hostels and other provision for victims.

All of these experiences of being victimised, marginalised and oppressed sadly make any marginalised group also more likely to be enmeshed in the prison system. One thing (white middle class) feminism does very badly is equating criminality or even violence with privilege, and looking for carceral solutions when in fact the causes of criminality and violence are complex. For example, recent reports show a rise in knife crime is associated with austerity

Of course, with minority groups and incarceration levels you also need to factor in the amount people are reported for crimes and the likelihood police will push for prosecution and a jury will convict. Given the extent of  society’s mistrust of trans people evidenced by the films, TV and headlines mentioned above, it’s safe to say that trans people do not experience the teflon-coated protection that the white middle class boys of this world receive when they do perpetrate.

That Swedish Study

Which brings us to ingredient #4 in creating the perfect storm of a lie about trans people. An oft-quoted (never been replicated) Swedish study claims trans women (and also trans men) show “male patterns of violence”. This is used by transphobes to “prove” that trans women have some innate “essence of maleness” that should exclude them from womanhood, whilst also pushing trans men conveniently outside of their circle of protection.

The study’s author came forward and protested transphobes misusing the study, saying:

“we were measuring and comparing the total number of convictions, not conviction type. We were not saying that cisgender males are convicted of crimes associated with marginalization and poverty. We didn’t control for that and we were certainly not saying that we found that trans women were a rape risk. What we were saying was that for the 1973 to 1988 cohort group and the cisgender male group, both experienced similar rates of convictions

. . .  claims about trans criminality, specifically rape likelihood, is misrepresenting the study findings. The study as a whole covers the period between 1973 and 2003. If one divides the cohort into two groups, 1973 to 1988 and 1989 to 2003, one observes that for the latter group (1989–2003), differences in mortality, suicide attempts and crime disappear. This means that for the 1989 to 2003 group, we did not find a male pattern of criminality.” (Source)

Leave aside the utter injustice the author used the term “male pattern of criminality” at all to describe offending numbers of trans women, when she could also have used the term “marginalised pattern of criminality” just as easily.

But, you apparently only need to worry about increased numbers of criminal trans people if you travel back in time to before 1988 anyway. All in all, this is surprising – given low socioeconomic status, repeat victimisation, poor housing, poor mental health and the number of trans people pushed into sex work, I would really expect our community to be more highly represented in the prison population than it apparently is.

The study’s author goes on to say that better treatment of trans people most likely led to the reduction in offending rates. Almost like making constant insinuations that we are dangerous and deviant has a material affect on our wellbeing and place in society.

In conclusion

These toxic lies about trans people, particularly women, leave them often excluded from people’s circle of care, treated as the “outsider” to be scared of instead of the vulnerable people to be scared for. In my work, I see the impact of this injustice every day. Truly vulnerable people constantly being subject to violence and abuse, excluded from services but more than that, excluded from people’s concern.

People don’t seem to realise this community is banging loudly on the door to be let in for a reason – not because we are difficult aggressive sociopaths demanding the unreasonable but because it’s scary and dangerous out here, particularly for trans women, and being included in the human pack and treated like a person in need of care and safety is a fundamental need.

It’s time to stop believing the lies.

Sarah Ditum – not “gender critical” enough

Sarah Ditum’s article in the New Statesman this week is very clever. I’m not going to link to it – New Statesman knows well enough that publishing Ditum’s ongoing campaign against my community will always attract a lot of traffic to its site – drawn by the inevitable controversy that follows.

This is business, make no mistake, and if the trans community gets hurt and make a fuss, well that will be good for business too.

Sadly, folks don’t read enough articles written by actual trans people to see through the holes in Ditum’s arguments, and this latest article in particular reads to the ignorant as being very comprehensive, reasonable and balanced. So, for those who have already read it and been taken in, here’s what’s wrong with it. For those who have not read it – don’t bother, it adds nothing new whatsoever to the feminist conversation and is in fact a warmed-over version of some very past their sell-by-date ideas.

I’m going to take us through the over-long article point by point to expose its manipulations and distortions, so apologies if this is also a long response.

1. The header image

The header image shows a pair of false eyelashes nestled in a makeup box. This is a trope – it signals the “falseness” of trans identities by boiling them down to how we adorn ourselves. It sets the tone subtly to undermine the “realness” of us.

2. The subtitle

“In the US and UK, politicians want to enshrine respect for “gender identity” into law. The only problem? There is no scientific consensus on what gender is.”

Right in the subtitle of the piece is the heart of what this article is about. There is a “problem” with enshrining respect for gender identity in law (i.e. giving trans people civil rights), because science has not explained gender identity yet.

In the same way, I suppose we can’t enshrine respect for gay people because science hasn’t fully explained them either.

We cannot respect what we don’t understand. Let that sink in for a moment.

3. The threat

” Alex Drummond, who is male and identifies as female without having had any surgical or hormonal treatment – and with a full beard”

Alex Drummond is a woman with a beard. Harnaam Kaur is also a woman with a beard. One is cis, one is trans. But Ditum wants us to be afraid of Alex. Ditum calls Alex “male” knowing full well the baggage that goes with that word is so much more than biological. She is effectively gendering Alex. Misgendering her, in fact.

Why can’t Alex just live her life in a way that makes her healthy and comfortable? Why can’t she just be accepted as herself? Ditum will show us how dangerous this all is, and in doing so will take us back to a very regressive place, where as long as trans women have all the surgery and make every effort to “pass” in conventional terms, they will be somewhat tolerated, but trans liberation must not be allowed.

4. What explains us?

Ditum lays out four possibilities for what makes gender identity.

a) Gender is hardwired in the brain.

The idea she cites as favoured and acceptable. She makes it clear that this is essentialist (I agree, and so do most trans people I know) and not popular with feminists (quite right). She infers it is popular with trans people – not so.

Ditum then goes on to imply there are only 3 other options (also not true):

b) A sexual fetish, ie. autogynephilia

This is where her earlier (disputed) assertion that there are more trans women than men comes in handy – we can just ignore how trans men don’t fit this theory, can’t we? Oh, and we can ignore all the research that debunks the theory, too (I particularly like this one that shows cis women have identical experiences).

c) Faulty thinking due to autism.

Ditum exploits the fact that there is a higher incidence of autism in the trans population to suggest that autistic people “latch onto” gender identity due to feeling different. As an autistic person myself, this disableism is very unsettling. The idea that autistic people cannot know themselves as well as neurotypical people has no basis in reality.

Interestingly, the link between autism and sexuality has been explored in the past in similarly problematic ways, but now it is no longer acceptable to speculate about whether gay men are gay due to faulty wiring (Alan Turing, anyone?), we have moved on to scrutinise and undermine trans identities instead.

d) A response to trauma

Another nasty contrivance. Kids that grow up different are far more easy to marginalise and therefore to bully and abuse. So of course the levels of trauma in our communities are higher, as within the LGB community.

Yes, they used to say being a lesbian was caused by abuse too.

Apparently there are no other ways to frame our existence. We’ll see about that later.

5. Trans children must be stopped

Ditum goes on to stick up for “poor” Ken Zucker, saying he “was attacked for not conforming to the current trans political line, and ultimately forced from his job”.

Zucker, if you are not aware, is a proponent of reparative therapy for both LGB and trans children. Zucker increasingly shifted the focus of his work away from gay kids and towards trans kids due to “political” changes. Imagine if Ditum was writing now about that political shift – away from it being ok to try and “cure” gay people.

All the reputable psychological organisations condemn reparative therapy for gay and trans kids, and Zucker was a lone proponent, ultimately fired by an independent investigation.

The man was a renegade, so why is Ditum not citing other research by people who work with trans kids, for balance? The article pretends to be comprehensive and even handed, but look at just a small sample of what’s missing.

Ditum later rehashes a tired old myth when it comes to trans children. Using the very scientific method of watching a TV documentary and listening to an anecdote, she concludes that trans children think they are trans because they like things associated with the opposite sex. She perpetuates the myth of desistance and misleadingly cites:

“studies suggesting 80 per cent of gender non-conforming  children go on to live in their original gender as adults”

Yes, this figure is true, but that’s because trans and gender non-conforming are not the same thing. Read this article to understand how this statistic is misused over and over again. There is also a better study that shows that gender identity in trans kids is equally as consistent as for cis kids. Not to mention (oh ok, I will) the other important recent study that demonstrates extremely positive outcomes for trans kids that receive treatment.

It is frustrating how much good work has been done to clear up these myths and yet how often they get trotted out to trap the unwary people who haven’t done the reading.

Has Ditum not done her reading? Or is she deliberately suppressing one side of the story – I will leave you to decide. Given the size of her platform, can anyone see the danger for trans people if she has not been fully ethical, balanced and diligent in her research?

A transgender child’s identification with another gender goes far beyond mere gender expression, and is extremely persistent. Often kids and parents talk about expressions and choices as some of the clues they had along the way, but obviously you cannot encompass years of gender dysphoria into a soundbite or even a documentary. And having seen the BBC documentary mentioned, Ditum is also guilty of having cherry picked the one line out of an hour’s programme that fits her own biased narrative.

6. Ergo we don’t exist

“arguably non-existent gender identity”

“In the absence of compelling evidence for brainsex”

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – we are still exploring the complexity of gender and biology. It is interesting that the lack of fully established evidence for brainsex spurs Ditum to fall back on possibilities that have even less evidence, including the entirely debunked theory that it is a paraphilia (autogynephilia, see above).

Like Ditum, I believe gender identity may well be multi-determined, and I am fiercely in the middle of the nature/nurture debate, as are most reputable scholars – it’s likely to be both. I do however see there are hints of a mosaic of brain and hormonal differences that, as Daphna Joel has discovered, are by no means binary. These findings back the notion of sex-similarity far more than sex-difference. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the entirely debunked theories of Simon Baron-Cohen and others, it is possible that there is biology at work here, as well as, of course, gender socialisation.

Ditum also cites “a response to homophobia” as one possible cause of being trans. As a person who identified as a lesbian for a decade as a response to transphobia and my reluctance to come out as trans, my challenge to Ditum is this – show me the evidence that there is more stigma attached to being gay than trans in this country and I will believe you. Show me a single study that prompted you to throw that one in the mix. Or are you just falling back on the tired old trope that trans women are “confused gay men”? Yes, there is an interrelationship between gender identity and sexuality, but they are not the same. Neither are they in competition with each other.

I lived a prosperous life as a lesbian and have suffered a massive loss of privilege and circumstance in coming out as trans. I came out not because it was advantageous but because my lesbian identity was a half-truth and not a full expression of who I am, and I could not continue to manage living in that half-truth.

8. Trans is a narrow option

“as the doctrine of gender identity draws tighter, options become ever narrower”

Again, where is the evidence of this? My experience of the trans community is that the more freedom to explore ourselves and be accepted we have, the more diverse narratives spring up, the more options become open to us and the more the walls between us break down. Where 20 years ago trans people were expected to live heteronormative lives, now many of us are out and challenging many of society’s preconceptions around gender.

My trans circle is fiercely feminist, distinctly radical, and demonstrates a range of possibilities from assigned female “trans dykes” who use she/her but challenge what it is to be a woman, to non-binary people who manage to live outside of gender entirely. People who ease their dysphoria through medicine and people who don’t. And yes, people who know themselves to be women but don’t go through a medical process, who face huge challenges because of that. It’s funny how the nonconforming trans people like Alex Drummond are held up as the threat, and at one and the same time it is our community that is supposedly narrowing the options. Meanwhile, ultra conservative trans people like Caitlyn Jenner falsely dominate the public’s idea of what it is to be trans.

An observant person might suggest that cis people keep narrowing our options, while we keep trying to widen them so that we can live more healthily and congruently.

9. Cis people know better

“The fact of suffering is not evidence that the sufferer has unimpeachable insight into the source of that suffering”

A clever one, this. Yes, it’s true in a way, but it’s also deeply patronising. As a person-centred counsellor I have learned time and again that my client, whoever they are, is the expert on their own life. What is certainly not true is that Ditum can claim any real ability to shed light on this discussion.

10. It’s dangerous to give us rights

Finally, after an awful lot of going round the houses, we reach the real point of the article.

Ditum is very clearly arguing against trans people having civil rights, citing harm to “women” (read cis women) as the reason.

So, Ditum has cast trans acceptance as conflicting with both the gay community and the cis women’s community. A classic capitalist tactic to divide the groups that could be working together. She could almost be working for a neoliberal elite, so helpful is she being to them. At least, her career is probably doing very well because her message is so helpful in preserving the status quo.

So what do we know? We know, in fact, that the people who are most at risk of sexual, physical and domestic violence are trans women, and we know that there has never been any real problem accommodating them. I have experience of working in trans inclusive women’s services and it was never an issue.

What Ditum ignores is the position a trans woman has within women’s spaces. She will be scrutinised and suspected and watched. She does not hold the power in that space. How exactly is she to be a danger to others?

Ditum also plays on a fear that it is in patriarchy’s interests to perpetuate: women must keep themselves apart to be safe. Never mind that this excludes women’s voices in society, as I discuss in this blog post. Men want women to be afraid of them. They use the threat of rape and violence to enforce that fear, to convince women segregation is in their best interests. Fear of trans women is just another way of establishing that status quo.

Meanwhile, gender non-conforming cis women and lesbians are sharing with trans women the often violent consequences of this fear, as they always have.

Let’s be clear, there is absolutely no evidence that trans rights will have any detrimental effect on women’s rights. The changes in trans rights and acceptance that have happened so far over the last 40 years have not created problems for women. The problems people like Ditum feared have not come to pass. In fact, the experience of trans women and the violence, sexualisation and objectification they experience has highlighted the fact of misogyny and added a useful perspective to the feminist conversation. Transfeminism is exciting and vibrant and has earned its place within mainstream feminism.

11. Trans people are criminals

So, one Swedish study from a long time ago that has been much critiqued suggested that trans women (and trans men, as it happens) are incarcerated more than an average population of women.

It also says that trans people are more suicidal than the average population, no surprise there given how we are treated. This is often misrepresented, as in this article, to suggest we are more suicidal post-transition than pre-transition, something that has again been thoroughly debunked.

I could point out, as others have, that the study is old, has not been replicated, and was a very small sample. But actually, in the case of the criminality statistics, I really don’t need to.

Instead, imagine if Ditum was quoting the incidence of incarceration of other minority women compared to the norm for all women – say, lesbians, mentally ill women, women of colour, women living in poverty, women who have experienced trauma. Now let her continue to say those incarceration rates are due to something inherent in that population, rather than the fact that we know marginalised minority populations have higher offending rates for complex sociological reasons.

Ditum then says that prisoners might pretend to be trans to get more favourable housing. Well, yes initially they might, but when they see the hoops they have to jump through they will probably think again. Nobody is suggesting that there will be instant prison transfers on an inmate’s say-so, meaning of course that the prisoner will have to live as a woman for some time in a men’s prison, and experience the full force of misogyny that trans women experience.

All incarcerations are risk assessed, as are hostel placements and refuge placements. The reality is, sometimes cis women are too dangerous to house in a women’s prison, hostel or refuge, and special accommodations have to be made. We don’t need a special rule that affects an entire minority group, because we already have rules in place to deal with violent, dangerous, and sex offending cis women.

Ditum fails to mention Vicky Thomson, who killed herself when she was put in a men’s prison despite having lived as a woman for years. Or Tara Hudson, who was also imprisoned and sexually harassed in a men’s prison despite having transitioned long ago. Or Mary, who was raped 2000 times in a men’s prison. She fails to highlight the women who really are at risk in all this, as if trans women’s lives don’t actually matter in the same way. She also fails to highlight that those women are likely to be in danger in women’s prisons too, if we continue to stigmatise and doubt their existence.

Then, apparently thinking it will clinch her argument, Ditum cites a case of a trans inmate having sex with other inmates. Not rape, let’s be clear, but sex. Because apparently sex doesn’t happen in prisons when there are no trans women around. It takes the presence of a penis and testicles (yes, of course Ditum has to mention these) for sex to happen. And note the wording – the trans woman had sex with the other inmates, no possibility that, excited by the appearance of a penis in their midst, they might have been the ones “having sex with” her. Because cis women are always passive?

Don’t let all this essentialism slide – who people are and in what way they can move through society is being brought entirely down to the shape of their genitals. Note how, in all her discourse, Ditum is actually pushing trans women back towards a medicalised model where they will have to have “full surgery” to be tolerated. She is pushing us away from people being able to live as Alex Drummond lives.

11. Trans feminists aren’t proper feminists

“Julia Serano, who insists on a definition of feminism that contains no reference to patriarchy”

Ditum grossly misrepresents Serano’s work. I would recommend reading Whipping Girl and Excluded, but here’s a blog about this, where, funnily enough, Serano mentions the reality of patriarchy, as she often does:

“In Excluded, I describe these “gender systems” – whether it be patriarchy, the gender binary, and so on – as being models that provide a fairly decent approximation of how sexism and marginalization function in our culture. However, like all models, they are necessarily incomplete, and there will always be instances where they do not accurately describe the world.”

Why would Ditum be so dismissive of the nuanced and thought-provoking (although not always perfect) work of a noted transfeminist? Isn’t this a balanced article that’s supposed to be looking at all sides of the issue?

12. Save us from this false ideology!

“There is a real danger that an unproven theory of innate gender identity is now directing treatments”

Again, where is the evidence? Treatments are outcomes-based, not theory based – doctors try to alleviate suffering, and continue doing what works best until a better solution is found. Despite quoting again that one discredited Swedish study, we know treatment outcomes for trans people are really positive.

The answer to the philosophical question of “who are we, really, when you get right down to it?” is not necessary to know that gender reassignment works for those who want it, saves lives, and saves the NHS a fortune in mental health services that will never resolve the issue.

Whoever we are deep down, being allowed the freedom to live in a way that resolves our sense of incongruence is good for us. And actually, what’s good for the individual is generally good for the people around that individual too. Allowing trans people to be happy and healthy is a win-win.

Also note Ditum mentions that one Swedish study and fails to mention the many many more recent ones – so much for balance. There’s a handful of papers on my professional web page to get you started. Hey, that one old, unreplicated study has done an awful lot of heavy lifting for gender critical feminists, it must be tired by now.

Conclusion: Not critical enough

Despite the length of the article, I think I’ve demonstrated Ditum’s cherry picking of information prevents this from being a genuinely critical look at the full story.

But for me, the biggest issue here is the way Ditum’s argument reinforces gender.

Gender is a social construct, this is rightly a tenet of feminist belief. Gender is the word we use for everything man-made about the differences between men and women. I use “man-made”advisedly, because nobody here is arguing that patriarchy is not a real thing. As I have argued before, though, this inevitably means sex as a man-made social class and legal status is actually a part of gender.

Cue my favourite training slide:

So, in trying to reinforce the legal segregation of gender, upon which all social construction of gender is built, Ditum is in fact propping up the very thing she claims to want to dismantle. She has argued (on BBC Newsnight, earlier in the year) that sex needs to be legally recorded for women’s protection.

Let’s put that to the test in the usual way: “In order to ensure you as a gay citizen are protected, we need to legally record your status as a homosexual on all your documentation.”

No way that could go wrong, is there?

So, here is a possibility Ditum never discussed. Women and men are not that fundamentally different, although there are all sorts of complex nuances to our neurological, chromosomal, hormonal, and social experiences that create variety in how we are embodied and how we experience and interact with the culture around us.

That culture is oppressive in a number of ways – it favours heterosexuality, masculinity, men, and the idea of oppositional sex, as Serano terms it (as well as whiteness, able-bodiedness, neurotypicality, etc).

Gender segregation, in the form of legal and social sex (really gender) assignment at birth, is one way in which the culture is oppressive. This legal and social process oppresses gay people, women and trans people. Trans people are fighting to exist comfortably within this oppressive system, but many of us are also fighting to change it.

Ditum, let’s be clear, is fighting to preserve it.

Post-script- added 20/5/16

Given how hastily I wrote this, in just one afternoon, I am overwhelmed by the messages of support it has had. The only response I had from Ditum herself is as follows:

A friend pointed out this is a fine example of “dead cat politics“.

Of course that is not what I am saying! I am saying, however, that gender segregated toilets are not a feminist invention, and not necessarily in the interests of feminism, but that reaction to fear of men and rape, legitimate as that is, can sometimes lead to decisions to back gender-enshrining legislation that isn’t ultimately in women’s interests.

So, some folks then brought up the risk to women from lack of appropriate sanitation facilities in India and Africa. White women appropriating the experiences of women of colour to further their own agenda? Surely not. So let’s get this clear:

We do not have to have gender segregation enshrined in law to make safe provisions for diverse people in diverse situations. There are times, of course, when people are getting naked and need appropriate privacy, and it’s important to provide them with that. Women’s safety and children’s safety are absolutely important. This safety and privacy is generally achieved by providing a door with a lock on it, along with other reasonable security measures like safe external access. I think you’ll find most UK toilets and most new changing facilities afford this safety and privacy, and women everywhere have a right to demand this. Desegregated does not mean not risk assessed.

If facilities are not safe for everyone to use, we should probably stop letting our boy children use toilets. And women should probably start worrying about the 64,000 registered women sex offenders who are permitted to use all these facilities.