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Search the various porn sites and you will find a lot of prison related content. A lot of this is based on the fetishisation of caged women, and a popular trope is the good girl who has found herself in trouble with the law and is brought. Trembling and fearful to the wing where the experienced inmates, often tattooed (the cliches abound don’t they) will help themselves to this delivery of fresh meat. Sometimes it will be the guards, male and female, who abuse her, sometimes with implements. And these tropes are to be found in non-porn depictions of female prison life too. Many of you may remember the Australian series Prisoner Cell Block H and the feared warder, Joan Ferguson who ostentatiously pulled on leather gloves before the many unnecessary body searches she carried out. The tabloid press, of course, also loves stories involving caged women.
So, it seems, do the Gender Critical brigade. It has become increasingly clear to me that their Keep Prisons Single Sex campaign also centres on the fetishisation of caged women and their vulnerability to sexual abuse. The arguments for the complete exclusion of trans people don’t stand up either. This should surprise no one.
Karen Whyte was a trans woman sent to a women’s prison. She was subsequently moved after committing a serious sexual assault on a vulnerable inmate who had befriended her. That Whyte…
