As little sympathy as I normally hold for any Jan 6 rioters, it is downright cruel to house her in a male prison. From what I’ve been able to suss out, she has been transitioned since at least 2004 when she did her legal name change. This is a person who has fully transitioned and been living as a woman for nearly 2 decades. Even though she is a traitorous piece of crap she deserves fair punishment under the law. To me, being a woman put into a male prison population should be considered cruel and unusual.
I’m conflicted. I completely agree with you and all of your points, and I don’t want to set a precedent like this.
But she did vote and advocate for the party that wants to keep misgendering her too…
Edit: I know folks, I agree with you all, we shouldn’t encourage this. The schadenfreude is sweet, but Ultimately it’s a bad thing. We should treat even the people who are against us with the respect we ask for
I look at it this way: we reveal ourselves by how we treat our helpless opponents.
Perfectly normal to have the emotional response of ‘serves her right.’ The better person has to stop, set the emotion aside, and ask whether the treatment fits their moral framework. If you can’t articulate why a transgendered friend, convicted of some crime, should be cross-housed, then this woman probably shouldn’t be, either.
Feeling conflicted is good - it’s your rational brain fighting with your emotional brain and winning.
We (LGBTQ) cant keep tolerating intolerance, or else we are going to end up without rights.
“We have to be the better person”, “We reveal ourselves by how we treat our helpless opponents”, etc… until we end up shot dead like that woman that put up the rainbow flag.
Fuck that.
Personally the way I see it is people like that don’t get to dictate our standards.
I’m against rape and murder. I’m not going to murder murderers, or rape rapists, or deny human rights to human rights deniers. I don’t go round mutilating people who self harm either.
Her misguided beliefs are not relevant to our treatment of her human rights.
What she voted for is completely independent of what society should be doing. The whole point is that her worldview is fucked and we do not want that worldview informing policy. So celebrating her getting her comeuppance is really just the same revenge fantasy that regressives push in lieu of actual policy.
She’s very likely going to be sexually assaulted and scarred for life, and I personally feel like this is unacceptable, even if it’s a leopard-eating-face moment.
Honestly, how I feel about it is this: I am a woman. No matter what, I am a woman. My gender identity isn’t something that can just be taken away, even if I do something awful. She’s absolutely a massive piece of shit. But she is still a woman, and should be treated like one.
Definitely good points made here and I agree, as much as this is a lamf moment, it is right on so many levels to advocate for her humane treatment.
Trying to remain sympathetic, but this is exactly what the side she was supporting would’ve wanted to happen to her. Or worse. Either way, absolute yikes…
In this case sexual assault is almost a guarantee. If for no other reason at all, that one should be enough to warrant her being housed in a women’s prison.
I love beehaw. The leftists here are shining examples of how we as a society should behave. We universally distain what she stands for and what she has done, but pretty much all of us advocate for her humane treatment. I am so thankful that I signed up for this instance instead of one of the others.
We’re not going to get our wish either way, unfortunately. I very seriously doubt that rape is only commonplace in men’s prisons. Our prisons appear to be specifically designed to encourage and maximize prisoners raping each other, because everyone on the outside considers that part of the punishment (“don’t drop the soap”).
Your comment made me curious, so I looked it up and found a 2006 study that says you are absolutely correct, inmate-on-inmate sexual violence is almost 4 times higher in women’s prisons: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2438589/ I seriously did not expect that.
I’m conflicted about how to react to this. Sticking strictly to reason and compassion, obviously she’s a woman and belongs in a women’s prison. Yet it would be a lie to say a part of me doesn’t have that visceral, emotional “did she really think she was so special that the leopards wouldn’t eat her face even though they’ve been baying for years about all the faces they want to eat?”
I think it’s okay to think she’s an awful, horrible, stupid human being, but still believe that she has the right to be treated humanely.
Agreed. I’ve been thinking about this overnight, and since it seems unlikely that Watkins’ right-wing allies will do anything to help her, maybe if people on the left fight for her, it’ll give her an opportunity to grow.
Also, yes! There’s a solid argument that prisons should only be used for individuals that are too dangerous to be roaming society, and only then until they’ve been rehabilitated, where possible. I don’t think prison sentences for non-violent crime serve any real purpose - even for the “punishment” element of dealing with crime, it would be better for society if non-violent criminals did volunteer work in the community or something similarly constructive/reparative, something that helps forge connections with others rather than cutting them off.
Definitely agreed that trans people should have their own wings. That is the case in some places. In the UK prisons have separate wings for vulnerable inmates, and that’s where trans prisoners generally end up. It’s part of why all the recent fuss about a trans woman with a history of sexual violence being housed in a women’s prison was a bit of an overreaction: she was kept in a segregated wing and never actually had any contact with other prisoners. That said, there are questions about whether she was genuinely trans, because she was a rapist who started transitioning after being convicted - I do believe that when someone with a history of sexual assault transitions in prison, it’s a reasonable to ask a lot of questions. But whether she was being honest or not, she was never in a position to actually hurt anyone, and moving her back to a male prison would also require she be segregated from the general population.
