Women’s prisons — they’re not just for women anymore. This is the real message now that a court has ruled that a man claiming womanhood must be moved to a women’s penitentiary.
As the Associated Press reported last Thursday, exercising the de rigueur practice of referencing the man with feminine pronouns (which I’ve replaced with the correct ones in square brackets), “A transgender woman serving a 10-year sentence in Illinois for burglary has been moved from a men’s to a women’s prison in what could be a first for the state, [his] lawyers announced today.”
“Deon ‘Strawberry’ Hampton, 27, was moved after a yearlong legal battle and resistance from the Illinois Department of Corrections,” the site continues. “The IDOC’s hand was forced last month by a federal court that found Hampton had a strong case that [his] equal-protection rights were violated. [His] lawyers said it was only the second such ruling in the country by a federal court.”
“[He] was moved within the past week from an all-male prison in Dixon, in northern Illinois, to the women’s Logan Correctional Center more than 100 miles away in central Illinois,” the AP further informs.
Interestingly, the news sources (including the AP) I searched didn’t mention the ruling judge’s name. However, the Herald&Review identifies the jurist who in November ordered the state to re-evaluate Hampton’s transfer request as Judge Nancy Rosenstengel of United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois; she is a Barack Obama appointee who signed a related court document here.
Among other things, Hampton complained that being unable “to comfortably represent [him]self as female in the male prison — where [he] couldn’t wear [his] hair or nails long — was devastating psychologically,” the AP relates. “‘I feel inhuman,’ Hampton was quoted as saying.”
Of course, what’s devastating psychologically is having “gender dysphoria” — the sense that one is a member of the opposite sex stuck in the “wrong” body — a disorder that should be treated as what it appears to be: a psychological condition.
Interestingly, while American Thinker reports that Hampton “has undergone surgical mutilation of his reproductive organs” (euphemistically labeled “gender-reassignment surgery”), the aforementioned court document indicates otherwise. It states that he has been taking female hormones, which have “feminized [his] looks while shrinking [his] muscles and male anatomy” and that he “has breasts and can no longer get” sexually aroused.
Or so it is claimed. This is significant because, do note, even chemical castration — which some sexual predators have undergone — is said to not always work. Perhaps this is why, as the AP tells us, the IDOC said one concern it had “was that Hampton would pose a risk to female inmates if moved.”
Apropos to this, it was reported in October that a man claiming womanhood sexually assaulted female inmates, and raped two others, at a British prison.
Speaking of which, Hampton and his lawyers lobbied for his transfer by, in part, quite believably claiming he was sexually harassed and assaulted in the men’s prison. Yet, tragically and as is well known, this fate is visited on many incarcerated men — especially those young and attractive. Transferring one of the victims merely because he’s a member of a now politically favored group solves nothing. The solution is prison reform ensuring that the inmates don’t run the asylum and do within it what got them into it: committing crimes.
But don’t look for rationality here. As I’ve often pointed out, there’s simply no good science behind the transgender claims. The gender-dysphoria diagnosis — which can later lead to genital-mutilation surgery — is made not based on a medical test that can identify physiological markers indicative of a biological condition, but on nothing but the experiencing of strong and persistent feelings of “cross-gender identification” lasting more than six months. Feelings — that’s it.
In other words, how much proof is there that gender dysphoria is a biological condition? Just as much as there is that “species dysphoria” — the sense of being an animal stuck in a human body — is one.
And just as much as there is that the claims of being younger than one’s chronological age (e.g., a 52-year-old man insisted he was a six-year-old girl) reflect a condition with a biological basis.
So will we, upon request, move an adult criminal claiming youth status to a juvenile-detention facility?
Will we move a species-dysphoric inmate, who feels out of place, to a zoo?
No. Not now, anyway. For some abnormal feelings are more equal than others — that is, as assessed and dictated by today’s Arbiters of Everything: judges.
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