The Countess calls for the Gender Recognition Act to be amended to exclude prisons after the release of Barbie Kardashian from prison earlier this week.
Barbie Kardashian – a man described as a clear and present danger to women by an Irish Judge – has been released from prison ten years after the Gender Recognition Act which allowed him to be sent to female prison was enacted. Immediately after his release he threatened to murder his own mother and the governor of Limerick prison.
Laoise de Brún BL, CEO of The Countess, said “This man who threatened to rape and torture his own mother, a female prisoner, and a female prison guard, and who tore off the eyelid of a female social worker, is now at large. The law that allowed him to be placed in female prison has no place on our statute books and must be immediately amended to exclude all female-only spaces including prisons. The data from the US bureau of prisons and the UK Ministry of Justice correlate: trans identified male prisoners are four times more likely to be sexual predators. Barbie is not the exception, he is the rule.”
The Countess calls for immediate changes to the GRA to restore single-sex provision in prisons and other female-only spaces like homeless shelters and toilets. The system of gender self-identification introduced in the Gender Recognition Act 2015 has led to the housing of male prisoners within the women’s prison estate in Ireland. Concern for the vulnerable women housed with these men was a catalyst for the founding of The Countess in 2020.
A new bill, The Gender Recognition (Amendment) (Prisons) Bill 2023, drafted by CEO and founder, Laoise De Brún BL, and introduced to the Dáil by Peadar Tóibín TD, aims to close this loophole in the law. The Countess position paper on prisons, entitled Gender and Sex in Irish Prisons, gives background, facts, and statistics supporting the bill. The paper fully explores and explains The Countess position on how the needs of all prisoners, especially women, can be met by the re-adoption of a policy of single-sex provision.
Ms de Brún said “Female prisoners are among the most women vulnerable in society, those kept in the care and custody of the state, 95% of whom are non-violent. The Countess has long viewed the granting of a Gender Recognition Certificate as an access-all-area pass for predators, chancers, transgressors and cheats and nowhere are the consequences felt more viscerally than in prisons. In the Irish prison system, and in all prison systems beholden to gender self-ID, the data is the same and irrefutable. Either trans-identified male prisoners are more likely to be sex offenders than other male prisoners OR sexual predators are using this loophole to get sent to female prison. It must one of these two things. And this loophole must be closed.”
Ten years ago, the Gender Recognition Act was sold as progress. Instead, it stripped women of the most basic protection we had, single-sex spaces. It’s time to stop ignoring the harm already done to women. Until women’s safety is guaranteed, there can be no further expansion of this legislation. A decade on, the truth is plain: the GRA failed women. The Oireachtas must put women’s rights first and end the practice of housing men in women’s prisons, without delay.
No man should ever be housed in female prison regardless of how they identify. Men and women have been housed in separate prisons since the Prisons (Ireland) Act 1826. One of the many unintended consequences of the 2015 GRA has been a reversal of a 200 year old policy of sex separation, which was brought about by reformers like Elizabeth Fry to protect female prisoners from male prisoners.
The only solution is to limit the scope of the effect of the Gender Recognition Certificate to protect women from being at risk from sharing prisons with men who identify as women, which is what we have done in the drafting of this amendment. It behoves legislators to vote to close the gaps that are now obvious to all reasonable people and to amend the GRA to exclude prisons from the scope.