“Not All Transwomen”
Argument Submitted by: D.B., PhD
Person A: “We shouldn’t allow biological males into women’s prisons because women could be raped.”
Person B: “But not all transwomen are rapists!”
This statement is a great example of a Straw Man. A straw man argument is when an opponent responds to you as though you had made a different argument from the one you are actually making so that it will be easier to refute you. In other words, your opponent makes your argument weaker than it is on purpose or because (s)he has misinterpreted you. In the example above, it’s implied that the speaker has interpreted the statement “It is possible for males who identify as women to rape women in women’s prisons” to be “males who identify as women will rape women in women’s prisons.” By interpreting the gender-critical feminist to be making a sweeping declaration about all trans-identified males, the gender theorist can refute her with just one counterexample of a TIM who behaves well in a women’s prison.
Not only is there a tremendous difference between the statement “all men are rapists” and “some men are rapists” but there is also a difference between the statement “some men are rapists” and “it’s possible for men to rape women.” To put it another way, we don’t need it to be true that there are any cases of rape in a women’s prison to make an argument against a male being transferred to a women’s prison. The fact that a man, in virtue of his biology, could rape a woman is sufficient argument against it. Those who argue for sex-segregated spaces don’t need to prove that any one man has raped a woman in women’s prisons. They only need to show that it becomes a possibility for a woman to be raped. Just because I walk down a dark alley in the middle of the night and don’t get assaulted doesn’t mean that it is just as safe to walk down dark alleys in the middle of the night as it is to be in a crowded office at noon.
It might help to emphasize to opponents that we are arguing that, in the case of sex-segregated prisons, it is not possible for a male inmate to rape a female inmate, while in the case of sex-integrated prisons it is. In other words, we oppose creating the conditions for the possibility of rape. In no way does admitting that a man has the unique ability to rape imply that all men rape. If we assumed someone is a rapist because he is a man, that would be sexist. Saying that a man’s biology gives him the ability to rape a woman, while her biology makes her incapable of raping him, is not sexist.