If you’ve been watching the “draconian” Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill make its way through parliament over the past month, you’re likely to have heard about a proposed amendment – made by the Conservative peer David Maclean on 10 January – to move incarcerated trans women into “separate, specialised units”, in order to prevent cis female prisoners from being subjected to “violence” and “rape”. In the days leading up to this amendment’s proposal, a frenzied campaign began on social media in support of it, with the hashtag #KeepPrisonsSingleSex. It trended on Twitter for days and received tens of thousands of posts, some of which were read out in the House of Lords by Claire Fox, who said the campaign had been bolstered by a study published in the Times headlined “Trans prisoners ‘switch gender again’ once freed from women’s units”.
The amendment was struck down in the House of Lords, with the opposition calling it “cruel”, “dangerous”, and misrepresenting the harsh reality that trans prisoners face. But the hashtag has clearly cut through: within days of the proposal, most mainstream publications – including the New Statesman – had run pieces supporting the campaign, no doubt in part because editors saw #KeepPrisonsSingleSex trending daily, picking up lots of clicks and views. By the end of the week, it looked like a major debate, with the public split evenly between those for and against.
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