Bad data equals bad policy outcomes

How some of the most vulnerable women in our society suffer the consequences of wokery in data collection

April Halley in her home in Newfoundland

Most of us are lucky and have never really had to contemplate the difference between male and female prisons. I was oblivious, for example, that they are way fewer female inmates than male although I did know that women commit fewer violent crimes. They commit waaay way fewer violent crimes and almost no murders and little sexual violence, especially over children. Female prisons tend to be lower security, and guards usually don’t carry guns. Women often end up in prisons through theft and drug related charges. (Kids, go for the white collar crime if you choose the life of crime.) There are under 800 federally incarcerated women in Canada right now. As of 2020, 42 percent of women in federal custody are Indigenous women.

Male prisons are the opposite. There are more male inmates, they require higher security, they commit most murders (of other men, and of women: only one sex is killing the other, there is no reciprocity) and sexual assault.

I and many others are now aware of this thanks to the tireless (and thankless) work of citizen journalists like the Newfoundland-based April Halley, who has been looking at the strangely off-the-media-radar issue of women’s prisons slowly becoming mixed-sex. As of a few years ago, Canada is a country where everybody has an obligation, lest they be legally challenged (thanks to the Bill-C16), to respect anybody’s declaration of opposite sex identification. While we don’t technically have the self-ID enshrined in law, you may get sued for discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” if you don’t honour someone’s cross-sex identification, no matter how ad hoc, or allow them access to the opposite sex-specific services and organizations. You could also be dragged through the para–legal human rights tribunals, which have embraced the policing of respect accorded to “gender identity”, if the Jessica Yaniv case is any indication. (To those blissfully unaware, a male vexatious litigant who identifies as a woman without any medical transitioning took five immigrant working-class women to the BC HR Tribunal because they told him they only know how to depilate women and have no expertise waxing scrotum. But I am a woman, JY insisted, and a BC Tribunal member took this seriously enough to take these women through a hearing. JY lost but promptly decided to take three of the women to civil court.)

For a host of reasons, the “gender identity” protection effectively means opening up female services, organizations and protections to males who identify as women. There are no contentious cases other way round. UK hereditary peerage laws worked out a cross-sex ID loophole to remain male sex-based, and most Masonic lodges still only accept people of male sex. No transmen have made a dent in male Olympic qualifications, nor are they clamouring to be housed in male prisons. It is possible to imagine a male hospital patient asking for a male nurse instead of a trans man or a female nurse, but it doesn’t sound like a likely scenario. Do the all-male elite private schools like the Upper Canada College accept trans-identified female people? I doubt it. Would the Catholic or the Orthodox churches accept trans men novitiates and train them to be priests? I doubt that too, and I can’t see very many trans men attempting.

Trans-identified males however have been seeking access to women’s shelters, spas, sports teams, scholarships for years now, and more frequently since the self-ID became dominant transactivist demand across the Anglosphere. So what happens if a male convict doing time for murder or sexual assault gets moved to a women’s estate? What will this mean for the prison guards, who are trained for very different inmates, what will it mean for the organization of prison itself, and most importantly what will it mean for the women in those prisons?

Nobody seems to care, is what April Halley has been finding. When she first started publicizing results from her Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) requests to the Correctional Services of Canada about the males put in female prisons over the last few years, she expected a journalist or media corporation to pick up the story and do some further lifting, but no such thing happened. (There are quite a few persistent and FOI obsessed journalists in this country, notably Robin Doolittle, but no one is touching this story.) It wasn’t easy to get the data in the first place, Halley says, as the public-facing staff sound either clueless or intentionally obfuscating. She tells more about her data gathering travails in this Quillette piece: after receiving some half-assed responses, Halley sought recourse to the Office of the Information Commissioner, and that did eventually speed up things. The CSC provided her with a list of transfers from men’s to women’s prisons from mid-2017 to end 2018, so this would be men who decided they are women while in a male prison. This leaves out those who decide they are women between being charged and being convicted, as well as transwomen who enter prisons as transwomen. Seven out of the eight men transferred had been convicted of a violent crime. Five offenders had murders listed as their main offence. Two had “Schedule I” offences—which include sexual offences and violent crimes that are not first and second-degree murder.

“I used to believe that if I got the information out the journalists will report on it. But it shocked me to discover after I published the Quillette piece that that won’t be happening,” she told me on Zoom from Newfounland last week. MPs aren’t eager to look at it either, whether they’re in opposition or government. Following her own old-school leftist instincts, she took her concern to the then sole NDP MP in Newfoundland Jack Harris who didn’t seem to get it at all and told her about the “importance of respecting nonbinary people”. A staffer from a Liberal MP’s office emailed her back to assure her that it would be “unethical” to house men in women’s prisons. She realized this would be a tougher nut than expected. She also discovered it was hard to get through to the neutral observers because what she was saying sounds mad: “Did you know that there are violent rapists in women’s prisons in Canada” sounds like something a madwoman on a bus stop would be muttering to herself. And yet it’s true.

The policy before the C-16 wasn’t ideal either, she says, but it left some leeway for differences in individual cases. “My interpretation was that it was at the discretion of prisons themselves until 1982, whether to place a post-op convict to women’s or men’s. The number of transitioned men was extremely small too.” Then in 2000, a HR Tribunal ruled that the CSC should be funding the sex reassignment surgery for trans-identified prisoners because not to do so would be “discriminatory on the bases of sex and disability”. (So far so Charter vocabulary – no notion of ‘gender identity’ which may be at odds with one’s body.) That further narrowed the leg room for saying no, and a convict who had raped a baby to the point of disfigurement did have his SRS funded by the state before transferring to a women’s prison that happened to have an Institutional Mother-Child program. (You can find the names of all these people in April’s Quillette piece.) After Bill C-16, males with no SRS too could demand to be transfers based on declared gender identity, and as we’ve seen, at least 8 have succeeded. “The way the CBC reported on the first male transferred (federally) makes me insane. You would think they were talking about Rosa Parks, not a man serving a life sentence for a gang related hit,” says Halley.

And yet there’s still room for noncompliance, especially in the complex multi-jurisdictional country like Canada, where each province has its own policy on how it records sex vs. declared gender, but April believes that this is closing down too. (When the C16 passed and was waiting ratification, a transactivist criticized Trudeau at a public event in Kingston about his “inaction” on transgender prisoners and, Haynes says, the PM personally saw to it that the road was clear for the housing of male inmates in women's prisons on the basis of their gender ID once the law was ratified.) “CSC is in the process of finalizing policy on that… don’t know who they’re consulting, but they’re not consulting women,” she says. The interim policy (Bulletin 584) that she says arose from Trudeau's intervention will be replaced with a formal policy. Halley tried to obtain a list of the groups they are consulting, to see if any real advocates for women were on it, but so far no luck.

Individual cases of transfers may elicit a ripple of protests here and there, depending on various factors. There was a protest in Montreal for example by the Union of Correctional Officers of Canada (UCCO) against the transfer of a specific high risk offender. But the institutions are folding one by one. The Elizabeth Fry Societies have adopted a pro self-ID policy at a conference in 2019 and ignored the solitary voice who spoke against. (Heather Mason, another great advocate for women in prison and for keeping prisons single sex, published a letter to the CAEFS urging them to reconsider, signed by 20 other women with direct experience in the carceral system.) The media have seemingly overnight changed how they report about crime committed by trans-identified males: the word trans woman is not used anymore in reporting, instead simply the word woman is being used and murders, sexual assault on minors and violent robberies are reported as if a garden variety woman has committed them. Sometimes a mug shot belies the gendering in the article itself, but other times there is no picture and one is left wondering, Hmm when did women start raping babies? What a world.

Halley has found some evidence that indicates that Statistics Canada now mandates police departments to record the self-declared gender instead of sex of both perpetrators and victims of crimes. I tell her I find that harder to believe and wonder if the police toe the gender self-ID line in their media-facing side and for their own records they do register sex accurately? “When I send these queries out to police departments, I get answers from people who believe that that’s the same thing and have to explain what the difference is and why it matters,” she says. One time she got someone from the RCMP on the phone who spoke to her about their gender-neutral uniforms. If this report about the OPP deciding not to publicize the “gender” of the victims and the suspects in their press releases and public addresses is anything to go by, there really is a lot of confusion inside the police departments. “It doesn’t matter what gender [the suspect] identifies as”, says the media relations officer for the OPP, and it really doesn’t if you record their sex accurately – but that’s not what she meant.

Perhaps some of you will remember, the last Stats Can census itself was a dog’s breakfast of contradictory concepts and woke speak, as if an EDI consultant had a jam session on the proper data-collecting questionnaires. That they offered a public consultation ahead of introducing the highly ideological “cisgender” and “gender identity” to the recording of sex and sexual orientation data, Halley says is moot because she believes they’d already adopted and naturalized those and the self-declaration instead of biological sex. I remember being asked about my sex, and then about my gender if different from the sex at birth, or something to that effect. “If you don’t fill gender they’ll fill it for you, they’ll assign you a gender identity. For some things they’ll record one variable only. For crime, unbelievably, they’re only recording gender. The Uniform Crime Reporting Survey records male and female as self-declared gender identity. Also for the Cannabis Survey, which is frankly stupid, because we need more accurate medical data.”

I tell her that I went to the hospital twice in the last couple of months for covid testing and whenever I log into my portal it’s refreshing – and reassuring – to see female + my age as two non-negotiable material realities there among the data. But then on my way out of the portal, I get some sort of EDI survey to fill out that asks “how I identify” and offers “gender-fluid” and “intersex”, an outdated concept for a host of medical DSD conditions, among the options. And it’s clear to me that no medical staff were involved in that part of the website. Yeah, we are doomed if the hospitals start taking gender identity instead of sex, Halley agrees. Can I identify out of my age? Maybe that’s next? We chuckle but concede that we can’t really see that one happening any time soon, alas.

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