If trans men are men, should they go to men’s prisons? Such a practice poses serious risks to trans men given that they are females. Prison would be particularly unsafe for them. But the reverse of this, i.e., trans women in women’s prisons, poses the same problem. If trans men are not safe around male inmates because they are female, then female inmates are not safe around trans women given that trans women are male.
This is where the logic the slogan “Trans women are women” shorthands unravels. The danger to trans men in male prisons is not because of sociocultural constructions of gender. The danger is not subjective. It’s objective. Males represent a particular threat to females. Not all males, of course, but given that most violent crime, especially violent sexual crimes, are perpetrated by males, males as a group represent a statistically significant threat to females as a group. Of the 100 thousand rapes that occurred in the United States in 2022, nearly 95 percent were perpetrated by men, with another 2 percent where the sex of the perpetrator was unknown. Around 90 percent of victims of rape were women that year. This is especially true for prisons, where sexual predators are housed in confined spaces. Of the more than 600 thousand males in US state prisons for perpetrating violent crimes (aggravated assault, murder, etc.), more than 160 thousand of them were convicted of sexual crimes.
We see the logic unravel in a similar way when we consider trans men in contact sports. Since trans men are females, and since the objective difference between males and females is vast, a trans man is at particular risk to be injured by a male player. Of course, it would be very rare for a trans man to make the team given those vast differences, so this problem is for the most part hypothetical. At the same time, however, for the very same reason that a trans man faces heightened risk playing against males in combat sports, so female athletes face heightened risk playing against males in female sports.
This is why it is important to grasp sex/gender as objective facts. When you obscure reality with thought-stopping slogans, you lose the ability to see that trans men in male prisons or male sports is the same problem as trans women in female prisons and female sports. To those who are not ideologically-impaired, this is obvious. It is very difficult to get those dispossessed of the capacity for the obvious by ideology to understand the implication of their demands that trans women be allowed in male prisons and sports. This is why we need the authorities to work from objective grounds in administering sex-segregated institutions. Unfortunately, gender ideology has colonized many of those institutions.
Note: to help make the point clearer to those who fallaciously differentiate sex from gender, I have refrained from describing males as men and females as women in the foregoing. So, in this note, I want to reiterate the fact that a man is an adult male human and a woman is adult female human. Males and females come in two types: boys and men and girls and women. Also, the vast physical differences between men and women is not the sole reason for sex segregation in sports. Women’s sports exist as a matter of equity in that institution. It is a violation of women’s rights to compel them to compete against men.
freedom and reason 