The Lord Paddick, also known as Brian Paddick, is a former senior Police officer in the Met, and a trans ally.
Allies are critical to our cause for trans acceptance in society and for us to achieve our aim – live our lives in peace and harmony.
Trans rights, though, are under threat. The gender-criticals and TERFs claim they are fighting for “sex-based rights”, but these rights do not exist in reality.
We all have rights – human rights. And like it or not, since 2004, transgender people have had the human and legal right to change sex.
Yesterday Brian Paddick experienced a Twitter “pile on” – because he dared to say in a House of Lords debate that a proposed change in the law to ban all trans women from female prisons was an attack on human rights.
Pile on’s are not pleasant, I have experienced several of them now. Having hundreds of people abuse you, sometimes claiming they are a misogynist or a variety of other names, can initially test your convictions.
In time though, we realise what they are, concerted campaigns by a relatively small number of hateful, obsessional, and bigoted people, often with many Twitter accounts.
Many may not realise that they have been drawn into a campaign about a fundamental human right to change sex. They may say that biologically you cant change sex – but the fact is legally we can.
Many do not realise that there are only a few people orchestrating campaigns and I want to be clear; I know several GC people who are decent and caring.
The campaign the senior gender crits and TERFS launched earlier this week used the hashtag #KeepPrisonsSingleSex and to get it trending, some peeps tweeted out many hundreds of times – accounts like @roswh, @1066cariad and @Bridget16152180 to name just three of about a dozen “launchpad” Twitter accounts.
This type of campaign is known as ‘astroturfing’ and is designed to make a subject matter appear to have widespread support and indeed in this particular case it worked with one speaker in a House of Lords debate making reference to the “trending tweets on Twitter”
The gender-critical Keep Prison Single Sex campaign is attempting to take away the right of trans women to be housed in the female estate.
People like the recently deceased April Ashley, a Vogue supermodel and film star.
Yep – if April were still alive today and was sent to prison, these “Lordships” campaigning to take away human rights would object that a woman in her eighties (and beautiful to boot) was in a female prison.
Everyone in prison has the right to be safe, including both women and trans women.
And to ensure trans people are placed in the correct estate, The Ministry of Justice and Prison Service has a policy of reviewing every trans person entering prisons and ascertaining which estate they should occupy.
We also need to be very clear exactly how many people we are talking about – around 140 trans women and around 40 trans men out of some 85,000 in jail just now. We know too that some 50 of the Self-ID’ing trans women are not strictly “trans” and these most certainly should AND ARE in the male estate.
The policy is called “The care and management of individuals who are transgender” and was implemented in October 2019. While far from perfect regarding trans people – the vast majority of trans women are sent to the male estate where they suffer sexual abuse; the system does work in favour of natal females.
The fact is that on average a trans woman is sexually assaulted in the male estate on average every thirty-three days.
Transphobes are precisely that – transphobes, and as much as they say they are not, I (and thousands of other trans women), don’t believe them.
In the UK prejudice and persecution of trans women are sadly rife.
Thank you for being a trans ally Brian – you are indeed on the right side of history.
Authored by Steph @PlaceSteph