9 Comments
Mar 18Liked by Glenna Goldis

Fantastic reporting! I just want to add that Massachusetts also allows inmates to be assigned housing on the basis of gender identity rather than sex.

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Damn...what started out as well-intentioned was hardly thought out and devolved into a nightmare. Go figure.

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Mar 20·edited Mar 20Liked by Glenna Goldis

That's what happens under patriarchy, Women are invisible. See for example, one man's regret for his role in the production of the ill-considered Yogyakarta Principles. https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/yogyakarta-principles/

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The fact that people are allowing this to happen is maddening to me. They’re saying that the safety concerns of one group are more valid than the safety concerns of another—women—when according to the Vera Institute 86% of incarcerated women are survivors of sexual assault. 86%. Democrats (and it’s mostly Democrats) pushing this stuff are more outraged about something that may or may not have happened to an upper class white woman in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room decades ago, or to another upper class white woman who knew a man that ended up on the Supreme Court—than they are to vulnerable women NOW. It’s indefensible. (I only mention race because they talk about it constantly and it is just obvious they’re flaming hypocrites.)

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Sadly I don’t think any of this changes until women start dying, and even then I’m not sure.

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author

I don't think anything will make these bureaucrats change their minds. If a male inmate killed his female cellmate they'd treat it like any other inmate-on-inmate violence.

Actually, there's one thing that would change their mind: if this policy became wildly unpopular among their peers.

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Hopefully you’re right. 🤞

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Your speculation seems sound. Terrific work.

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blame the Civil Rights Act

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