Last week, I told you of the magical powers that allowed me to predict the arrest of a woman four years in advance. This week, I’m going to tell you about a group of magic feminists who predicted, six years ago, that women in Victorian prisons would be locked in a second prison of administrative injustice.
The magic women, who may in fact be witches, are from a sect of dissidents who don’t believe in gender souls. The Australian Labor Party and the Greens refer to these women simply as ‘the transphobes’. As the ghastly predictions of the transphobes come true, I wonder if the scold’s bridle of social shame that has been given to them may finally be removed.
In 2019, the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2019 (BDMRAB) was passed in Victoria. The Attorney General responsible for passing the legislation, Jill Hennessy, said that the aim of the reforms was that ‘trans and gender diverse people can have a birth certificate which reflects their true identity’.
The Australian reported that feminists were objecting to the Bill, and they were being called ‘transphobic’. In the report, a woman named Nina Vallins, spokeswoman for the Victorian Women’s Guild, claimed that women’s spaces were in danger, that female prisoners were at risk, and she warned that the sex self-ID legislation was being passed recklessly, without adequate consultation with women’s groups and concerns for women’s safety.
Ms Hennessy said the bill was ‘developed in consultation with LGBTI communities’ and ‘declined to answer questions on how widely the government had consulted on the bill’.
In their submission to the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee in 2019, with concerns about the BDMRAB, the Women’s Guild raised the issue of vulnerable women’s prisoners and said that it would be ‘unjust to make the rights of women in prison … dependent on administrative decisions which they cannot appeal’.
In the wake of the scandal of a male paedophile being placed in a women’s prison in Victoria, Premier Jacinta Allan deflected any accountability by saying that Corrections Victoria is responsible for the placement of prisoners in Victoria.
The Labor government, which Allan leads, has hamstrung the very administrative structure that she points to as responsible for the safety of women in Victorian prisons. They have done so with the self-ID legislation that the Labor government enthusiastically developed, promoted, and passed.
Thanks to the Labor Party, Corrections Victoria cannot protect vulnerable women, because like all government departments in Victoria, it cannot recognise natal sex, only legal sex, and in Victoria everyone has a right to choose their own legal sex to affirm their identity.
Placing prisoners in mixed sex facilities is a violation of the Nelson Mandela Rules of humane prison management, which require a separation of male and female prisoners. Achieving this justice is an impossible aim for women under the authority of Corrections Victoria, because there is no avenue for a prisoner to appeal legislation that defines men as women. This second prison of injustice makes the dissident feminists of the Victorian Women’s Guild seem spookily prescient.
The fact that self-ID is operating exactly the way that the dissident feminists predicted should translate to a political victory for all those who opposed self-ID legislation, like the Victorian Liberal Party.
Brad Battin, Leader of the Opposition in Victoria, has come out saying that his party opposes male sex offenders in women’s prisons. He is proposing to take only the convicted male sex offenders out of women’s prisons, even though rape and sexual assault are well-known to be under-reported crimes. Most sexual crimes by men, against women and children, will never see a courtroom.
This half-baked solution does not have the capacity to keep women safe, because the problem is not just sex offenders in women’s spaces, it’s men in women’s spaces. Ultimately, the problem is the erasure of women as a people who can exist separately from men.
To gain political traction, Battin should be pointing to the women’s rights and safety violations self-ID legislation has caused. Issues that the government was warned of and ignored. Issues that his party raised to oppose in the legislation in 2019.
There should be no men in women’s prison, no matter what crime they have committed, no matter how vulnerable they are; women’s bodies don’t exist to rescue men from other men.
Other ‘moderate’ commentators have suggested that the psychological assessments can separate the wheat from the chaff among the special men who seek access to vulnerable women’s bodies. Let me tell you about the psychological assessment for the male paedophile in question (from hereon to be known as ‘the paedophile’).
One forensic psychiatrist prepared a report for the court in relation to the paedophile, which referred to the paedophile as a woman and a mother, even though a man can be neither of those things.
The forensic psychiatrist pointed out that paraphilias are very rare in women, particularly paedophilia, and especially the sexual abuse of their own children. Women who engage in child sex abuse are more likely to do so because of coercion from a man. These statistical realities were the foundation assumptions of the psychologist’s report, even though the paedophile only changed his legal name and birth sex marker to female during the trial.
In psychiatric terms, just performing a sex act on a child does not make a person a paedophile. In diagnosing paedophilia, the intrinsic deviant sexual motivation is considered relevant to the person’s danger to others.
This report framed the paedophile as a female person who had been coerced into performing horrific sex acts on his daughter by a man. The report also claimed that the paedophile ‘was not inherently motivated by deviant sexual interests or any other motive’.
By imposing the criminal profile of a woman on the male paedophile, the court was able to mask the deviant nature of the paedophile and the paraphilic dynamic between the two paedophiles involved in abusing the little girl.
Dom/sub (dominant/submissive) sexual roleplay is a feature of BDSM, (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism, and masochism) and is typical in some forms of trans porn.
Genevieve Gluck has researched trans-related porn in relation to the link between fetish and identity. In an interview with Brendan O’Neill from Spiked Online, Genevieve said trans-porn often features men humiliating and degrading themselves ‘by performing certain objectifying constructs of femininity’.
The porn genre of sissy-porn, Genevieve explains, centres the sissified male (usually a man dressed in sexualised feminine clothing and makeup), as an object to be dominated and abused. In sissy porn, womanhood is achieved through submissiveness and abuse because, for these fetishists, womanhood exists in submission to men and in vulnerability to male-pattern sexual violence.
By framing BDSM roleplaying as legitimate female oppression, an Australian court has validated violently misogynistic pornographic narratives in the service of affirming a paedophile as a vulnerable woman. Importantly, the paedophile was characterised, through this ideology-sodden psychology, as someone of no substantive danger to society, and more specifically, no substantive danger to women or children.
Worse than that (I know it doesn’t seem possible), the Judge said that the paedophile’s ‘gender identity was not fully accepted’ by the women in his life, and this lack of affirmation was a mitigating factor in his crimes. In this scenario, paedophilia was accepted as a desperate act of gender affirmation by the court, and therefore, it is suggested the victim’s mother and grandmother are given some responsibility for the crimes against the little girl, because they failed to affirm the girl’s father as a woman.
The framing of the man as a woman and a victim, instead of a willing player in a male pattern, violent, and criminal paedophilia game, was also a consideration in both the length of the paedophile’s sentence and his placement in the female prison estate.
The Judge was at liberty to impose a sentence as long as 25 years for the crime, which is described in graphic horror in the court documents, but taking into account the mitigating circumstance, they sentenced the biological man to four years and nine months, to be eligible for parole in two years and six months. This sentence is being served in a women’s prison.
The ability to falsify sex with self-ID legislation has allowed a paedophile to adopt all the legal and cultural currency of women and mothers, most critically, that they were free of male-pattern sexual deviancy. This assumption that men with altered birth certificates are free from male pattern deviancy and violence is carried through all the spaces in Australia that were once exclusively for the privacy, safety, and dignity of females.
Male birth markers can be changed throughout Australia, with a declaration from a man that he feels like a woman inside. If you question whether all these men are free from male sexual deviancy or violence, you, too, are a transphobe. Welcome.
Among the transphobes, we sometimes sit around the fire, sharpening our broomsticks, wondering what issue may finally break the spell of trans insanity. No one guessed, not even the most cynical of the hags, that it would be a man performing sex acts on his own daughter, and that a court of law would accept that this horrific sexual violence was a gender affirming practice, reduce his sentence, and send him to a women’s prison, all because he engaged in BDSM with another man while abusing his daughter.
The depths of depravity that humans will excuse in the service of their ideology are heartbreaking. I am now pleading with the Liberal and National Parties in this country to stand up and put this wickedness out of our misery.
Listen to the dissident feminists, our real superpower is to tell you what happens when you disable government protections for women. This is basic, old-fashioned feminism, and it requires hardly any witchcraft at all. Protect women and children, repeal self-ID everywhere.
Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism. She tweets at @msediewyatt and blogs on substack
