Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

And Halley found press coverage about two post-operative transwomen held in women’s jails. One, classified by the CSC as female, is Tara Desousa (Adam Laboucan), whose crimes included a rape of a three-month-old baby so brutal that the victim required reconstructive surgery, and who has admitted to killing a three-year-old when aged eleven. Desousa is now held in a prison with a mother-and-baby unit. Another is Madilyn (Matthew) Harks, who committed at least two hundred sexual crimes against at least sixty victims, including girls of four and five. After being released from a women’s prison Harks, who has been diagnosed by psychiatrists as having an ‘all-encompassing preoccupation in sexually abusing young girls’, was admitted to a women’s half-way house, again with a mother-and-child unit.