LGB Alliance Australia

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What have women in prison done to deserve this?!

Volunteer Writer

OPINION

The protests at the Alameda County Courthouse in California

In any camps in which women prisoners of war, as well as men, are accommodated, separate dormitories shall be provided for them.
—Article 25, Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

 

Just how our leaders and their lobbyists have decided that it’s now OK to put some men in women’s prisons is difficult to fathom.

There has been no discussion in societies around the world about modifying the conditions under which women are held in prisons. Numbers have increased steadily for decades in most places because of non-sexist attitudes to sentencing and stricter parole requirements. The crimes women are being incarcerated for has also changed. But the principle of keeping women and men separate in prisons, for the purpose of women’s safety, and sometimes for the safety of their children, has been secure.

But now there’s this case in California, and we should talk about it. It’s special because it’s so horrible. It’s a warning sign that cries out to tell us something. I think we’d better listen.

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A small group of women is protesting on the steps of the Alameda County Court in Oakland, California. It’s an intentionally quiet protest. They don’t want to argue on the streets with people who might disagree with them—and there are people who do disagree, as you will see.

Women's protest at Alameda County Court, California.

You can read the full details of who Dana Rivers is, and what he did, on Kara Dansky's Substack and in the article by Mandy Stadtmiller (links below). Here is the gist of it…

‘Dana Rivers’ is a man who, for a long time, had a fetish for thinking that he is a woman, which he told students (girls) at the school where he worked was something he learned from pornography. He claims to have been liberated by pornography, that it taught him his “gender deviant mindfreak” was “healthy & sane and delightfully irrational.”

He wrote three pornographic books detailing torture and abuse of women, using the by-line ‘Dana Rivers’, and these books are still available on Amazon.

Mandy Stadtmiller tells of his teaching career, and emergence as the new ‘Dana Rivers’:

It was then, when he was still David Warfield, that the imposing, super-macho teacher told a classroom full of young students that he had been “sodomized” as a kid, that “he always felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body” and that “he was going to be changing into a woman in the fall.”

Because of such abusive and predatory behavior—no teacher should ever discuss such details with their students…obviously—he was let go after eight years of service.

Then, after David had multiple surgeries to achieve his desired fetish-affirming synthetic sex identity and rechristened himself as Dana, the Navy vet then leveraged his termination into a $150,000 settlement and fawning media attention.

On his website, when discussing his diagnosis of gender dysphoria, he says that if anyone has a problem with it, “don’t expect a big debate from this girl.”

A press release about Rivers later that year had him practically vibrating with his newfound celebrity.

“To be honest,” he said. “I love it.”

The celebrity Dana Rivers wrote an article decrying his exclusion from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival: “Any rule that would exclude me from the community,” he wrote in the 2000 piece, “is intolerable to me.” He was an active member of a group of trans-identifying men that threatened the women at the festival.

Dana Rivers, formerly David Warfield, released his rage on Charlotte Reed, Patricia Wright, Benny Diambu-Wright, late in the evening of 10 November 2016.

Just after midnight, in the first few minutes of Veterans’ Day, police turned up at the Reed-Wright home to find the house on fire.

Dana Rivers had entered the home and shot Charlotte Reed in her bed; and shot and stabbed her wife, Patricia Wright; and shot their adopted son Benny Diambu-Wright, who had just graduated from high school, dragging his body out of the house.

Returning to Charlotte Reed’s body to express his rage more fully than simply by killing her, Dana Rivers stabbed Charlotte 44 times. He stabbed her 28 times in the face.

Then he put on Charlotte’s blood-drenched leather jacket, took Benny’s new iPod, and set about burning the house down.

Charlotte Reed’s great crime was making the mistake of befriending Rivers at a local VA years before and then after briefly considering becoming a member of his motorcycle club became the victim of his stalking and threats and then ultimately his insidious refriending once again—all so he could gain Charlotte’s trust long enough to get inside her house and kill her along with every single person she had ever cared about in the world.
— Mandy Stadtmiller

***

Dana Rivers has been tried and found guilty. A further process is in train to determine if the court will accept his assertion of insanity.

The small group of women on the steps of the Alameda County Court in California are concerned that Dana Rivers is going to be sent to a women’s prison. In first few days of December 2022 these women took their purple and while banners, put on their ‘adult human female’ sashes, and this happened …

See this content in the original post

And here are the ‘men’ taking time to photograph themselves, with evident pride, burning the banner they stole from the protest.

Anti-TERF action group burning the women's protest banner.

***

The horrifying crimes of Dana Rivers made we wonder what women in prison have done to deserve being locked up with monsters. I wondered why gender activists, like the one’s pictured burning the spoils of their ‘anti-TERF’ action, would want to defend any policy or process that even hinted someone like Dana Rivers had a right to be viewed as a woman, to be treated as a woman, to be punished as a woman, to be taken seriously in any way as a woman.

What have women in prison anywhere in the world, regardless of whatever crimes they have committed, done to deserve being locked up with men who have made a special effort to demonstrate their hatred of women by assaulting, raping, and murdering them?

What have they done to deserve that additional punishment, beyond the punishment of their incarceration?

It’s obvious, isn’t it, that gender activists view themselves as being in a war against women, TERFs, and reality?

One end of the spectrum, gender ideologues imagine there is a subtle distinction between ‘trans women’ and people who are just pretending to have a deep, profound, inner conviction that they are, despite all evidence to the contrary, actually women. This is the part of the gender belief system that can say, straight-faced, in a literature search for the new Gender Recognition Act in Scotland, that there are claims “trans women’s inclusion in women-only spaces and services would lead to cisgender men posing as trans women in order to gain access to these spaces and services for malicious reasons.” Gender diviners apparently have magical powers to distinguish, at a glance, between sincere and insincere beliefs. And, in any case, they say, there’s really no evidence that the threat to women is ‘real.’ »» https://bit.ly/3hfz9BG

At the other end of the spectrum of gender activism, no one brooks any mention of doubt about the idea that men master womanhood simply through the power of assertion. Someone puts on a bit of lippy, sits with his legs together, and affects an old-world feminine graciousness in hand movements, and— voilà, he is a woman.

Either way, Dana Rivers represents a special problem for gender activists. They must accept him as a ‘woman.’ His commitment is total. He went under the knife. Equally undeniable is his misogyny, a hatred of women that is unalloyed and unstoppable. The situation makes you wonder if there might be some connection between the commitment and the hate.

Why should we care, anyway, that these vicious trans criminals will end up in women’s prisons?

The actual women in those women’s prisons—in the UK, USA, and now in Australia—they are the canaries in the coal mine.

***

Australians have started to imprison violent men in women’s prisons. No one asked if women deserved this. There was no election promise. There was no debate.

The increased incarceration of women for violence-related offences in some Australian and overseas jurisdictions points to pervasive systemic gender bias and discrimination in the criminal justice process. Emerging anecdotal and recent research and court-related data are disturbing and suggest that women’s fundamental human rights and freedoms are under attack.

The national imprisonment rate has increased faster for women than for men over the past decade: in the previous ten years, the national rate of imprisonment of women increased 40 per cent which was almost double that of men; while from 1995 to 2009, the number of female prisoners increased by 154.5 per cent compared with an increase in male prisoners of 63.9 per cent. Similar trends are evident in other countries including the US, the UK, and the Netherlands.
»» Kerr and Shackel, https://bityl.co/GA1S

The increases disproportionately affect women who have mental health problems, have been homeless, unemployed, or abused, or are First Nations women.

While comprising 3% of the total female population, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women make up one-third of Australia’s female prison population. This is unsurprising, given the criminalisation of women is primarily a criminalisation of the most marginalised.
»» https://bityl.co/GA1l

Women in prisons are the first to have the effects of the self-ID changes pressed on them by force. These women live confined with the fear of the changes. The protests fall on the deaf ears of progressive government ministers and attorney’s general.

If government can imprison violent men, or any men, with such marginalised, disadvantaged women, it can do it to anyone. Governments establish the lowest possible bar for success in forcing these changes on women in prisons.

When the gender tribe tells you that words are actual violence, do they mean violence like actually stabbing someone in the face, murdering their family and burning down their home, or some other sort of violence?

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By Justin Ian, volunteer writer

Petition to remove men from women’s prisons in Victoria »» https://bityl.co/GEnH

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