An educational charity has cancelled a conference on prison reform at Britain’s Open University in Milton Keynes following threats by transgender activists over what they claim is the group’s “transphobic” policy.
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has cancelled its conference, which was scheduled for May, after transgender activists threatened to disrupt the event due to the charity’s policy that biological males claiming to be female should be incarcerated separately from biological female prisoners.
According to Times Higher Education, literature distributed by the Trans Liberation Assembly, described as a “collective of militant feminist groups,” claimed the “abhorrent transphobia [of] so-called respectable academics at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies” is a “sinister factor in this increasingly violent treatment enacted against trans women who are victims of the prison estate.”
The activists reportedly distributed the handouts on March 8, International Women’s Day, while they occupied the Ministry of Justice. According to the report, the pamphlet condemned “measures [that] demonize trans women as posing an inherent threat to ‘real’ women.”
The educational charity cancelled the conference after reports that the same transgender activists planned to target the event. The group informed the delegates who had planned to attend that the Open University had been “subjected to concerted pressure by those intent on disrupting the conference.”
Times Higher Education continued:
The event’s cancellation is the latest in a series of flash points over academics’ views on gender self-identification and whether transgender women should have access to areas, such as prisons, where vulnerable women are housed. In December, Rosa Freedman, professor of law, conflict and global development at the University of Reading, told how her office door had been covered in urine and how she had received threatening anonymous phone calls after debating proposed gender law changes.
Kathleen Stock, professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, who has also faced hostility from students for her views on gender identity, reportedly said, “People have stuck things to my office saying I am not welcome on campus and students have held placards on campus saying that I am transphobic.”
The conference is cancelled in the wake of the case of a male transgender prisoner who used the name Karen White, but was previously known as David Thompson and born Stephen Wood.
As Breitbart London reported, White, 52, who is jailed for life, was convicted of multiple rapes and sexual abuse of a child, as well as sexual assaults on fellow inmates within days of being remanded into HMP New Hall, a women’s prison.
As the Guardian reported, White admitted to sexually assaulting women in the prison.
The Ministry of Justice apologized for moving White to the female prison.
“Prosecutor Chris Dunn described White as an ‘alleged transgender female’ who has used her ‘transgender persona to put herself in contact with vulnerable persons’ whom she could then abuse,” the Guardian further reported.
When Judge Christopher Batty sentenced White, he said, “You are a predator and highly manipulative and, in my view, you are a danger. You represent a significant risk of serious harm to children, to women and to the general public.”
According to the report at Times Higher Education, however, the transgender campaigners claim the policy of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies that recommends separating male transgender prisoners from biological women amounts to “state-sanctioned murder,” in light of several suicides of the transgender men in men’s prisons.
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