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Jessica Watkins (mtf) sentenced to 8 years in a men's prison for Jan 6 involvement
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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As little sympathy as I normally hold for any Jan 6 rioters, it is downright cruel to house her in a male prison. From what I've been able to suss out, she has been transitioned since at least 2004 when she did her legal name change. This is a person who has fully transitioned and been living as a woman for nearly 2 decades. Even though she is a traitorous piece of crap she deserves fair punishment under the law. To me, being a woman put into a male prison population should be considered cruel and unusual.
I look at it this way: we reveal ourselves by how we treat our helpless opponents.
Perfectly normal to have the emotional response of 'serves her right.' The better person has to stop, set the emotion aside, and ask whether the treatment fits their moral framework. If you can't articulate why a transgendered friend, convicted of some crime, should be cross-housed, then this woman probably shouldn't be, either.
Feeling conflicted is good - it's your rational brain fighting with your emotional brain and winning.
We (LGBTQ) cant keep tolerating intolerance, or else we are going to end up without rights.
"We have to be the better person", "We reveal ourselves by how we treat our helpless opponents", etc... until we end up shot dead like that woman that put up the rainbow flag.
Fuck that.
Having her serve her sentence in the appropriate prison isn't tolerating intolerance. She will still be convicted and be in prison for the duration of her sentence.
Nobody's asking you to forgive her for what she's done, we're just saying that when your enemies are being raped and tortured, perhaps it would be good for you to say "hmm, can we achieve justice without all the rape and torture maybe?"
Truth. As much as I'd like to see these people have some epiphany moment of realizing how wrong they were to back people who would turn on them, they won't. They deserve the better world we want for them, even if they are too much of a cantankerous bastard to ever be thankful for it.
We need a better society that snuffs out such hateful movements before they capture vulnerable people. Because that is what these type of groups (read: cults) operate on, finding vulnerable, lonely people who need to feel like they are part of a group and need to feel like they have a purpose. They offer those things to the lost and broken, even when they know they will turn their own knives back on those they recruit, when the time comes. As we saw with COVID, even facing death won't make them learn they backed the wrong horse, with many of them saying COVID was a hoax until their own rasping, COVID-infected dying breath.
As cathartic letting those who get sucked into these cults suffer the punishment of their own hubris feels, they will learn nothing from it. Better to create a better world around their crappy selves.
I have no sympathy for people that are electing people that want to take rights away from LGBTQ. I have had enough. Wish you all thought the same. Maybe when you are shot dead for having a rainbow flag in your door you will think the same.
No one's asking you to have sympathy. You're being asked to ignore that base part of our monkey brains that delights in hurting the people we feel deserve it for its own sake when we're talking about how to design fair and equitable systems of justice.
I have no sympathy for them either, but this isn't a genetics or upbringing thing, new broken people and new manipulative people will always be with us. There is no way to sever them from society other than resorting to the same authoritarian tactics that they use (such as murder), so it is much better to create a better society that makes their complaints about it seem as loony as they actually are. As long as there are broken people to prey on, there will be new manipulators who follow the script. For example, Donald Trump isn't actually smart enough to understand he's playing the fascist playbook, he knows it as the mob boss playbook combined with a life in which he has faced no punishment, so it stands to reason he really believes he deserves no punishment for anything he has done. He knows he did them, and just thinks they don't count as criminal acts because he did them, and he is special. A lot of his choices have more to do with his own narcissism than they have to do with genuine fascism, they just end up appearing the same. His fascist followers and enablers, on the other hand...
We can not have sympathy for them while also advocating for better prison conditions in which to lock them up. They still did wrong, they violated their own community, no less, but us resorting to their tactics means we've lost the plot, because removing our enemies from society will not suddenly make society better (or stop new people from doing the same things). We need to minimize the damage they can do, absolutely, but that can and should be done without resorting to outright removal from society. Rehabilitation may be impossible, but it should still be the goal.
Tolerating intolerance would be accepting that transgender people get put in the wrong prison.
It's literally tolerating intolerance.
Doing it because the person in question happens to be a piece of shit, doesn't make it any less tolerating of intolerance or somehow cancels it out.
When her killer walks free, you can riot. I'm not asking for tolerance of intolerance; I'm asking you to treat humans like humans or to justify housing Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner in a men's prison.
Imprisoning people in the correct facility is not "tolerating intolerance", so I'm genuinely very confused how you think that's relevant.
we can have some sympathy. but at the same time im not gonna lose any sleep over this. what did this person think would happen to lgbtq+ people if trumps coup succeeded? republicans have shown for a long time who they are towards the lgbtq+ community. they've been specifically targeting transgender people since, at the latest, 2016 with all the bathroom crap.
should she be in a womens prison, yes. but when you side with those that would put other transgender people in the wrong prison its hard to have much sympathy or empathy. its better to go high when they go low, sometimes you just need to kick them in the mouth when they go low. and this person is currently getting kicked in the mouth.
It doesn't require any sympathy or empathy, nor does it require any level of siding with her.
Either one believes that trans people should be treated equally before the law, or one does not. Ditto every other category of person. It is possible to have prisons which contain prisoners without exposing them to actual harm, and this should be true in every prison for every prisoner, no matter how heinous their actions.
So though women's prisons in the US are hardly free from both sexual and transphobic violence, nor men's prisons safe environments for male prisoners, sending a woman to a men's prison automatically makes her sentence far more onerous than that of her fellow insurrectionists found guilty of a similar level of behaviour but who are sent to prisons which match their gender. Remember; all of them are at least as supportive as she is of a party which endangers trans people.
Honestly, how I feel about it is this: I am a woman. No matter what, I am a woman. My gender identity isn't something that can just be taken away, even if I do something awful. She's absolutely a massive piece of shit. But she is still a woman, and should be treated like one.
What she voted for is completely independent of what society should be doing. The whole point is that her worldview is fucked and we do not want that worldview informing policy. So celebrating her getting her comeuppance is really just the same revenge fantasy that regressives push in lieu of actual policy.
She's very likely going to be sexually assaulted and scarred for life, and I personally feel like this is unacceptable, even if it's a leopard-eating-face moment.
Im not going to lose my sleep for something happening to someone that is electing people that want to take LGBTQ rights away. I agree that she should be in a women's prision. I am in no way celebrating what's happening to her, but she elected her own destiny.
Personally the way I see it is people like that don't get to dictate our standards.
I'm against rape and murder. I'm not going to murder murderers, or rape rapists, or deny human rights to human rights deniers. I don't go round mutilating people who self harm either.
Her misguided beliefs are not relevant to our treatment of her human rights.
And agreeing with her would be a mistake.
There is unfortunately nothing unusual about prisoners being raped. That's a problem bigger than just Watkins, and the vast majority of America seems to be completely okay with it. Makes me sick.