Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

At first I was puzzled that well-educated young women were the most ardent supporters of this new policy of gender self-identification, even though it is very much against their interests. A man may be embarrassed if a female person uses a male changing room; a male in a communal female facility can inspire fear. I came to see it as the rising generation’s ‘luxury belief’ – a creed espoused by members of an elite to enhance their status in each other’s eyes, with the harms experienced by the less fortunate. If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes.

I got used to being told ‘you’re right,’ followed by ‘but I can’t say so in public.’

Developments in academia played a central role. Feminists used to use the word ‘gender’, and some still do, to denote the societal framing of female people as inferior and subordinate to male ones. Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed. But in the 1990s the word was borrowed to signify a discourse – or, in the words of Judith Butler, the doyenne of gender studies and queer theory, ‘an imitation for which there is no original’. And so in these academic fields, which developed on American campuses out of 1960s French postmodernism, a man or woman came to mean someone who performed manhood or womanhood, which were sets of stereotypes – matters of self-presentation, such as clothing and hairstyle, and behaviours, such as choice of hobbies and career – that were meaningful simply because they were performed over and over again. In the past decade, even the tenuous link with objective reality provided by those stereotypes has been severed. In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul.

The other belief systems accommodated in modern democracies are, by and large, held privately. You can subscribe to the doctrine of reincarnation or resurrection alongside fellow believers, or on your own. Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognise other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them.

Ideas have consequences, and one of the consequences of the idea of gender self-identification is that children are being manipulated and damaged. Once you have seen that, it is hard to look away.

In Galileo’s Middle Finger, Dreger offers another insight: since autogynephilia involves a fantasy of truly becoming, or already being, a woman, any reference to it can be experienced as an insult. ‘There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labelled,’ she writes. ‘When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name.’ This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’ Consider the favoured insult of the angry youth wing of transactivism: TERF, which stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’. The first part does not refer to excluding trans people from jobs, housing or other goods: it simply means denying that identifying as a woman makes you one.

She posits that autogynephilia’s inwardly directed nature, and the frustrations attendant on requiring others to validate your cross-sex identity, mean that the condition co-occurs with narcissistic disorders more often than would happen by chance. And narcissists often respond to minor slights with disproportionate rage. It is not hard to find evidence of ‘narcissistic personality traits, including a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and lack of empathy’ in the attacks

on Bailey, she writes in a 2008 paper entitled ‘Shame and narcissistic rage in autogynephilic transsexuals’.

Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and ‘troubling’ or ‘queering’ the definitions of oppressed groups.

But the ‘assigned at birth’ argument means that, within gender-identity ideology, transwomen are not only women, but also female. Depending on its owner’s identity, a penis may be a female sex organ. Riley J. Dennis, an American transwoman YouTuber (and self-described ‘lesbian icon’), talks about ‘girldick’, which is ‘basically like a big clitoris’. Or a transwoman’s penis may be described as an ‘outie’ vagina. I have tried to explain all this to many people who did not take gender studies or a similar subject during the past decade, and who do not move in left-wing activist circles or spend much time on social media. Universally, they refuse to believe that it is anything more than ivory-tower thought experimentation.

The two elements of a binary, in other words, can continue to describe the same distinct groups as they always did, while being stripped of the associations and interpretations that situate one group as dominant and the other as subordinate. Such work is essential to imagining a better future, for women and every other group on the wrong side of a binary. But queer theory does none of it. Instead, because of gender-identity ideology, the quest for the liberation of people with female bodies has arrived at an extraordinary position: that they do not even constitute a group that merits a name.

And every study pointed to the same conclusion: they were pretty likely to grow up gay, and very unlikely to still identify as or want to be members of the opposite sex. There was no such thing as a ‘trans child’ in the sense of one who could be identified as certain, or even highly likely, to grow up to be a trans adult. But these facts contradict gender-identity ideology. So nowadays, they are ignored.

A final, remarkable aspect of this link between homophobia and transition is that organisations that purport to campaign for gay rights seem blind to it. Trans in America: Texas Strong was produced by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When Pakistan’s government decided recently to start funding sex-change surgery for gay males – a decision inspired by the mullahs’ belief that homosexual desire indicates that you have a brain of the opposite sex – Pink News, a British website founded to cover issues relevant to gay people, described Pakistan as ‘making history with this move for trans rights’. This is despite ample evidence that some gay men in Pakistan, and in Iran, which has similar policies, undergo such surgery unwillingly rather than risk the penalties for gay sex. These include beatings, imprisonment and even execution. A growing number of gay people are waking up to the link, however. I have heard gender affirmation described as ‘postmodern gay conversion therapy’.

‘It’s like if you took girls with eating disorders and gave them a belief system that validated their body hatred,’ says Ayad. ‘I’m not dealing with a child and their dysphoria; I’m dealing with a child, their dysphoria and their religion.’

But the main thing I thought when Kay told me her story was: ‘Here’s the shoeshine boy.’ Supposedly, shortly before the 1929 stock market crash that started the Great Depression, a shoeshine boy offered stock tips to Joe Kennedy (JFK’s father), and the story is often cited by market-watchers when they think that a bubble inflated by unsophisticated retail investors is about to pop. Similarly, trans identification has moved outwards from the highly gender non-conforming and dysphoric, through the troubled and unhappy, to those who are a little intense and spend a lot of time online. With luck, Kay is a sign that the bubble of trans identification among teenage girls is about to burst.

A new medical paradigm, therefore, may do something more profound than give doctors a new way to understand what they see: it can change what they see. Sometimes, a new condition is born – and sometimes it gains sudden popularity. The history of medicine is scattered with psychosomatic diseases that appeared, spread like wildfire and died away as medical thinking changed again. One sign a new condition may fall into this category is that it mainly affects teenage girls and young women. They are more likely than other demographics to indulge in ‘co-rumination’: repetitive discussion and speculation within a peer group. That can lead to internalising problems, and thence to anxiety, depression and self-harm. Girls are also often more empathetic than boys, and better at reading moods, which means emotions spread faster in a female peer group than in a male one. That is why self-harm and eating disorders can run through female friends, and why historical episodes of mass hysteria, such as fainting fits, uncontrollable laughter or crying, and outbreaks of paralysis or tremors, have so often occurred in convents and girls’ schools.

Accompanying teaching materials often seem about to make an excellent point, only to miss it spectacularly. You nod along to descriptions of restrictive gender norms, hoping for the right conclusion: that nobody need conform if they do not want to, and that there is nothing wrong with boys playing with dolls or girls playing with trucks. You long to hear that girls (or boys) are people with female (or male) bodies who behave however they damn well please; instead you hear that girls (or boys) are people who behave in feminine (or masculine) ways. You hear, in other words, that the way people perform stereotypes makes them who they are – and that bodies that don’t match those stereotypes need to be changed.

You can judge how easy it is to find a doctor in Canada willing to certify that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are in a child’s best interests from the recording of an event at Vancouver Public Library in February 2019. In it, Wallace Wong, a child psychologist, can be heard saying that his paediatric gender clinic sees around five hundred children who are in public care. His caseload is around one thousand, he says, and his youngest client not yet three. He advises parents to accelerate children’s transition by exaggerating their gender dysphoria, and claiming that if transition is prevented, they will kill themselves. ‘Pull a stunt,’ he says. ‘Suicide, every time – they will give you what you need.’

In the late 1960s, some European liberals thought that breaking down sexual taboos was a task that had to be started young. In German kindergartens run along radical-left lines, teachers encouraged children to fondle them, view pornography and simulate sexual intercourse. Contemporaneous accounts show that parents often felt qualms, which they suppressed because of what they had been told about how children should naturally behave. What happened was child-abuse, though motivated by political conviction rather than sexual desire. But it did not take long before paedophiles saw their chance. The leaders of the sexual revolution were men whose aims were to legalise homosexuality – and, in some cases, to smash the heterosexual family unit. Few if any wanted to endanger children; they simply did not give children enough thought. Left-wing organisations tolerated groups such as the UK’s Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which had links with the Labour Party and the civil-rights group now called Liberty. In Germany, a political organisation called the Study and Work Group on Paedophilia made remarkable advances. In 1980, a youth group affiliated with the liberal Free Democratic Party adopted pro-paedophilia positions, as did the Green Party, formed the same year. Paedophiles gained such a hearing on the Left partly by persuading Leftists that their enemies’ enemies were automatically friends. In this case, the enemies were Conservatives, Catholics, evangelicals and fascists,...

Males are easier to include in a movement centred on personal choice than in a movement centred on an analysis of male oppression and exploitation of females. And with the rise of identitarianism on the Left, intersectionality became distorted. In activist discourse, it often came to seem that people were nothing but collections of identity labels, and that everyone who shared a given set experienced the world in the same way. An insight that should have added nuance and richness to analyses of women’s sex-based oppression led to fragmentation, and made it easier to ignore that oppression. And when women were discussed as a single, biologically delineated group, the incoherence of including males – or transwomen – had been glaring.

I have read many attempts to give trans-inclusionary definitions of woman some objective basis, and all fail. Some rely on weak analogies; others try so hard to include transwomen that they end up excluding some natal women (on grounds other than not identifying as women). For more details, see the further reading section for this chapter. But above all, in every case they fail to do what their proponents want, namely to include within womanhood all the males who want to be included. This isn’t really so surprising. The only thing that these self-identified women have in common is that they are male. The central doctrine of gender-identity ideology – that your gender identity is what you say it is – necessarily precludes any objective delineation. If you cannot see this, it is because you do in fact know what a woman is, and did not notice yourself calling on that knowledge as you read those flowery statements. Try ‘a squawm is anyone who identifies as a squawm,’ or ‘every lazap is a lazap.’ Now, can you say what a squawm or a lazap is?

A movement that started as a roar of anger about the consequences for female people of male sexual entitlement and violence could no longer even name the problem.

The result is that the very people who berate opponents of gender-identity ideology for ‘reducing people to their genitals’ insist that females are referred to as body parts and reproductive functions. Governments, companies, charities and media outlets now talk of ‘people who menstruate’, ‘pregnant people’, ‘abortion seekers’ and ‘birthing parents’, where they would once simply have said ‘women’. Here are a few indicative examples. The UK’s National Health Service explains that ‘the concept of virginity for people with vaginas has a complicated history’. Teen Vogue offers a ‘no-nonsense, 101 guide to masturbation for vagina owners’. Information campaigns from cancer charities tell ‘anyone with a cervix’ to get regular Pap smear tests. An ad for Tampax enjoins the world to ‘celebrate the diversity of all people who bleed’. La Leche League USA says it ‘supports all breastfeeding, chestfeeding, and human milk feeding families’. An American charity bemoans the frequency with which ‘black birthing bodies’ die in the delivery room. This language carves women up into pieces to be used for sexual and reproductive services. It is reminiscent of porn sites,

If the stated reasons for such language, namely to be inclusive of transmen when talking about female issues, were sincere, then we would see similar linguistic manoeuvres in order not to exclude transwomen when talking about males. There would be guides to masturbation for ‘penis owners’, and articles and advertising campaigns aimed at testicle havers, semen producers and the like. ‘Anyone with a prostate’ would be told to get it checked. But no such language is used. Factsheets about prostate cancer start by saying: ‘Only men have a prostate.’ When I googled ‘testicle havers’, I was asked if I meant ‘testicle shavers’. The asymmetry is flagrant.

It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that trans-inclusive language is inclusive in one direction only. It aims at removing all obstacles to using the words ‘woman’ and ‘female’ for any male who wants them, without requiring any special accommodation for females who wish to identify into maleness or manhood.

The transfer policy is hopelessly naive about the motives of males who identify as women, Mason says. Those who committed child-abuse or rape are often shunned and mistreated in men’s prisons. Some see identifying as a woman as their way out. Transfers to women’s prisons are therefore skewed towards precisely those males who are most dangerous to women and children – the latter being particularly concerning because several women’s prisons in Canada have low-security, homelike sections where mothers can care for young children.

Rarely acknowledged in discussions about single-sex spaces is that, until recently, most were for men. The best schools and all universities; well-paid jobs; sporting competitions; political institutions: all were male-only. Some of women’s anger at the recent pretence that it is impossible to distinguish between males and females stems from knowing that, when it was women who were excluded, there was no uncertainty.

World Rugby knows the evidence it has so painstakingly gathered will not save it from human-rights challenges in countries with legal gender self-identification. Meanwhile, women’s groups may also bring challenges to trans inclusion against national federations. Under British law, failing to exclude males from women’s sports is arguably indirect discrimination. A case would be hard to win, since indirect discrimination is hard to prove. But even a failed challenge would provide campaigners with a chance to make their argument in the court of public opinion. If you want to know how sporting bodies got into this pickle in the first place, you could do worse than consider the presentations made at World Rugby’s workshop. The experts opposing trans inclusion drew on research and statistics, and explored the pros and cons for everyone on the pitch. Those in favour presented anecdotes, appealed to emotion and considered the consequences for transwomen only. They had no concrete or logical arguments. ‘Perhaps the most striking aspect of the workshop was the gulf in methodological and scientific robustness between the arguments for and against inclusion,’ says Tucker. ‘The positions were obviously different, but the difference between the evidence bases underpinning those differences was enormous’.

Chattel slavery and racial segregation have marked America in many more obvious ways, but for the purposes of this book, the most significant are that they have invited false analogies between race and sex, and poisoned words and phrases such as ‘exclusion’, ‘segregation’ and ‘separate but equal’. It has become close to impossible for left-leaning Americans to articulate arguments based on material differences between the sexes. For them, all ‘discrimination’ is patterned on white privilege and black oppression. The word’s original meaning of acknowledging difference is almost completely inaccessible. And so the bathroom wars were mentally slotted into a narrative in which bigots attempted to exclude a marginalised group and were beaten back. This is not me reaching for effect; analogies with the civil-rights era are routinely deployed in support of gender self-identification.

It is less obvious why gay people did not rebel against their cause being hitched to a less popular one that had already cost them a likely legislative victory. One reason was no doubt natural sympathy for another minority. At least as salient, however, was that the main demands of transactivists – namely, that transwomen should gain access to women’s spaces and, if sexually interested in women, be regarded as lesbians – did not discommode gay men, whose interests had always taken precedence in LGB activism.

And finally, the HRC’s punishment for accepting the sexual-orientation-only version of the proposed new law put the entire Left on notice. Transactivists picketed its fundraisers, including its gala dinner in Washington. Then came the legalisation of gay marriage. Some veteran campaigners stepped down, making way for graduates stuffed to the gills with queer theory. Campaign groups needed a new marquee cause – and the transactivists had one ready and waiting. With barely a pause for breath, civil-rights organisations big and small changed their focus to gender self-identification.

Fortunately, the limited statistics available suggest that trans people in safer places are not at greatly elevated risk of violence. Their life expectancy depends mostly on the same things as everyone else’s – sex, occupation, state of health and so on – and not on their identity. But they do have specific needs that would be worth addressing. They are on average poorer than their fellow citizens, and more likely to have mental-health problems. Above all, they would benefit from high-quality research into the origins of cross-sex identities, and how to care for a body altered by cross-sex hormones and surgeries as it ages. But mainstream transactivism does none of this. It works largely towards two ends: ensuring that male people can access female spaces; and removing barriers to cross-sex hormones and surgeries, even in childhood. These are not the needs of people on low incomes at risk of poor health. They are the desires of rich, powerful males who want to be classed as women. Everything I have written about – the harm to children’s bodies; the loss of women’s privacy; the destruction of women’s sports; and the perversion of language – is collateral damage.

In an age of corporate social responsibility, it is convenient to have a tiny oppressed minority to focus on. Rainbow lanyards, pronoun badges and ‘all-gender’ toilets cost little or nothing. Opening a crèche, offering paid internships for working-class youngsters or adapting the workplace for disabled employees would do more for genuine diversity and inclusion. But these policies would be expensive and, without powerful lobbies promoting them, do less to burnish a company’s reputation.

Helping gender-dysphoric people feel comfortable in their bodies makes no one much money; turning them into lifelong patients is highly profitable. In the US, puberty blockers cost around $20,000 a year. Cross-sex hormones are cheaper, but taken for decades. ‘Top surgery’ – breast implants for transwomen and double mastectomy for transmen – costs at least $10,000. Vaginoplasty costs $10,000–30,000; more for someone whose missed out on puberty and hence has child-sized genitals, since skin will have to be harvested from elsewhere. ‘Bottom surgery’ for transmen starts at around $20,000 for metoidioplasty, which takes advantage of the clitoral growth caused by testosterone to create a small pseudo-phallus. Phalloplasty costs as much as $150,000.

‘I did not come to politics to work with people who gave this little of a fuck about women prisoners, who everybody knows have overwhelmingly been victims of child-abuse, domestic violence and commercial sex exploitation,’ she says. ‘These women have no political representation, cannot vote, cannot talk to the press. And the people who should be speaking up for them have abandoned them. If my two options are talk to the ADF, or talk to somebody on the Left who calls me a fascist KKK bleep bleep bleep and hopes I die in a fire, is it even a choice?’

Established gay-rights groups have stood by as people who assert same-sex orientation are told that they have a ‘genital fetish’ and lesbians are told to accept penises as female sex organs. Indeed, those groups have joined in the bullying. Stonewall was founded to fight homophobia. Yet, at a Pride March in 2019, when lesbians waving banners that read ‘Lesbians don’t have penises’ and ‘Pro women not anti-trans’ were threatened, the chair of Stonewall’s board praised the bullies, tweeting: ‘Thank you! The right instinct’.

British women could look across the Atlantic to see what was coming, and had time to organise. Culture mattered, too. The idea that life’s central purpose is to search for your true self is American, not British. The UK never had chattel slavery on its own soil, the legacy of which has so warped American thinking about material differences between the sexes. It is less religious than the US, and less polarised. Abortion is not politicised, which makes it easier for left-wing feminists to work with Christian conservatives on a single-issue campaign. Many of the women leading the UK’s feminist resurgence were teenagers in the 1980s, the era of New Romantics and glam rockers. They are comfortable with men who gender-bend and still see themselves as men.

There is a precedent for precisely such a societal shift: that in attitudes towards homosexuality over the past half-century. And many transactivists, analogising transphobia with homophobia, confidently expect history to repeat itself with gender self-ID. But for several reasons, I do not think it will. The first is that genuine transphobia – disgust or animus towards trans people – is far rarer than homophobia was fifty years ago. What is usually meant by the word – objection to gender identity overriding sex – is nothing like homophobia, and hence not likely to shift for the same sorts of reasons. The public polling discussed in chapter 11 suggests that people who oppose gender self-ID do not usually do so because they object to trans people as such, but because of their assessment of what is at stake for themselves and everyone else. The second is that increased trans visibility will not have the same effect as increased gay visibility. As more gay people came out, starting in the 1960s and continuing through the AIDS crisis into the 2000s, straight people gradually realised two things: that gay people were just like everyone else apart from their sexual orientation, and that their orientation was no skin off anyone else’s nose. Seeing and meeting more trans people may indeed encourage understanding and empathy. But when it comes to the ideology, rather than the people, it will only encourage hostility. The more males compete in women’s sports, the more obvious the unf...

How might the beliefs of those who espouse gender-identity ideology change, if contrary views are no longer silenced and it becomes clear that the enthusiasts are in the minority? That depends on why enthusiasts hold their beliefs. Kevin Simler, an author and scientist, distinguishes between ‘merit beliefs’ and ‘crony beliefs’, which are held and abandoned for different reasons. It is my contention that many people’s adherence to gender-identity ideology is cronyistic, in this sense, and will be abandoned when it is no longer in the ascendant.

‘merit beliefs by helping us navigate the world, crony beliefs by helping us look good’.

The applicability to gender-identity ideology is obvious. Proclaiming that transwomen are women is a way of showing that you are a member of an elite intellectual tribe – university-educated, left-leaning and too sophisticated to categorise people by their physiology. Adherence is signalled with pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios. The frequent use of the word ‘dangerous’ for Rowling’s blogpost was revealing, since it contained neither insults nor threats. If critics felt capable of rebutting it point by point, they would not have felt endangered by it. The true danger was that readers might find it convincing.

The final indication of a crony belief is that nothing important is allowed to ride on it. To show that this is true of gender-identity ideology, I offer the following thought experiment. Picture a person who insists that transwomen are women in every circumstance. If transwomen commit crimes, they belong in women’s prisons; if they play sport, they belong on women’s teams. If they are attracted to women, lesbians must regard them as potential sexual partners. Such a person will accept no distinction between sex and gender. Transwomen differ from ‘cis women’ only in having been mistakenly ‘assigned male at birth’. Now, what will our true believer do if they need a gestational surrogate? I am familiar with some men in this situation. They spend a good deal of time harassing the women they call TERFs, and trying to get them fired. But when it comes to something central to their own lives, their beliefs fly out the window. The distinction between male and female that they refuse to admit even exists is tacitly accepted once it is crucial to something they really want. My point is not that the capacity to become pregnant is a necessary condition of being a woman. Some women are too young or too old, or have undergone hysterectomy, or have health conditions that make pregnancy unachievable or unsustainable. The point is that if a ‘cis’ woman cannot become pregnant, there must be some such reason, and if she is of child-bearing age you would need to ask about her medical history...

Too many other groups who regard gender self-identification as harmful are insisting on expressing their worries and stating their needs. Less obviously, negotiation is in trans people’s interests. The ‘with us or against us’ approach taken by activist groups that claim to speak for them is very harmful to their long-term interests. This is already obvious when it comes to inclusion of transwomen in women’s sports, which strikes most people as grossly unfair, and in the ideological approach to paediatric transitioning, which risks positioning trans people as careless of children’s long-term health. Describing opposition to these policies as transphobia will simply denude that word of all meaning – to trans people’s detriment.

Among the parties to this long-overdue negotiation are, of course, trans people. Their interests differ according to whether they are male or female; pre-, post- or non-operative; or same-sex or opposite-sex attracted. And like any group of people who share a single personal characteristic, they come from across the political spectrum. The full range must be heard – not just the activists who present gender self-identification as the sole solution to every problem.

And if legal sex can be changed, everyone who uses official statistics has an interest in play, since sex is one of the most predictive variables in the medical and social sciences, and one of the most important for planning public services. This may seem a minor issue, since trans people are rare – but they are hugely over-represented in certain subgroups. Some paediatric gender clinics say that half the children they assess have autistic-spectrum traits, and that most have mental-health disorders. Since these conditions manifest differently in males and females, it is essential that doctors continue to record and treat trans-identified children as members of their sex, not their stated gender identity.

The gulf between male and female patterns of criminality means that male people already make up a large share of all ‘woman-identified’ perpetrators of violent and sexual offences. If self-declared gender identity is recorded, and sex is not, soon what is ‘known’ about female offenders will be shaped by male-pattern offending. That would have serious consequences for crime-prevention and rehabilitation.

I will consider just two further situations of the many that will require attention. One is prisons. Inmates of both sexes and all identities share the same core interests: safety and dignity, decent living conditions, suitable training and rehabilitation. Trans people may also have an interest in receiving clothing and toiletries not normally available to prisoners of their sex, and, depending on local rules, being able to satisfy any requirement to ‘live as the opposite sex’ to qualify for medical treatment. I see no way to protect female prisoners’ safety and dignity if males are held alongside them. Prisons are not private enough for mixed-sex living, and the under-reporting of violent and sexual offending by males makes case-by-case risk assessment impossible. Moreover, accommodating males, who are physically stronger and far more likely to be dangerous offenders, would require women’s prisons to increase security and operate along stricter, more punitive lines, causing female prisoners further harm.