Limerick Prison Report.

This is a special report into Limerick Prison since housing three male prisoners in the women’s wing. The full report is below. 👇

Limerick-Prison-COVID-19-Thematic-Inspection-Report-2021

I did a piece on Barbie Kardashian for Graham Linehan’s substack; a seriously disturbed young man with convictions for violent attacks on women. Brought up by an abusive father he was recruited to join in the violent assaults on his mother. I have reproduced this on my blog with a link to the court case which brought this young boy to my attention. Now he identifies as a “woman” and has been transferred to the female estate, in Limerick Prison. He has not only committed serious violence against women but he threatens sexual violence and has a specific resentment for the female sex. 

I blogged on him here. Article contains links to the original court transcript, relating to a previous detention order. This was prior to his current conviction for which I have not managed to get a court transcript.

Barbie Kardashion

Limerick Prison was subject to an official inspection in April 2021. At that time three males, with a transgender identity, were held in the female estate. Limerick Prison houses both males and females who are, normally, held separately. 

Because males are generally held in the estate suitable for their sex the inspections cover the male and the female experience. For the females one of the issues raised was lack of access to tampons even through there was a scheme to provide them free of charge.

The other issues mentioned were the lack of any toilet facilities, for females, in the exercise yard. There were facilities for males. Without a trace of irony the inspection report points out their own recommendation which states women should be allowed time to exercise “out of sight of male prisoners”. The total and utter disrespect shown by making female prisons mixed sex and still feigning support for women’s dignity!

That is about as much attention as they gave to female prisoners. But they do spend an inordinate length of time angsting about the male sex /violent offenders they have put on the women’s wing.

The Yogyakarta principles are a document drawn up by some of the more extreme trans-activists. These principles have no standing in international law despite being referred to by many HuMAN rights organisations, who claim they promote best practice. One of the men involved recently broke ranks to criticise them and admit that too little thought was given to the rights of women. Robert Wintemute, one of the signatories, to the principles admits the rights of women were not given sufficient consideration. 👇

The Irish Prison Inspectorate seems to have fully aligned with the Yogyakarta principles as they demonstrate below. 👇 Note the prisoner has a voice about where they are placed in the prison accommodation. What about the women?

Ireland operates on the self-identification principle such that even a male with a history of violent/sexual abuse of women is not precluded from obtaining a gender recognition certificate. There is no safeguarding built into this process. Any man who claims to identify as a “woman” is granted a GRC. This has created the inhumane policy of housing males in female prisons. (Not just Ireland, by the way, Scotland allows “self-id” and so do England. There are no female prisons in Wales. I don’t know the situation in Northern Ireland). 

Now we come to the conditions in which the males, with a claimed trans-identity, are held. They are held in their prison cells for 23 out of 24 hours. They appear to have single cells, which are somewhat of a rarity in Irish prisons. I agree it is inhuman to restrict prisoners in this way, unless the alternative is to expose women to risk. Notice the Irish prison service have adopted the language of gender identity ideologues so you have to do some mental gymnastics to realise we are not talking about women here. We are talking about males. At least one of those males is a grave danger to women.

The situation for these detainees is, I agree, likely to be causing them psychological harm. However, the risk to females, if they were allowed free association, is likely to be more than psychological.

If ever there was a prisoner that could use access to a “listening” service whilst in prison this person would appear to be one. However, having read some prisoner accounts of the “listener” service it would appear it is not an unmitigated good. The service is run by other prisoners and there are reports some use information shared, by vulnerable prisoners, for nefarious reasons. It is not clear if the “listeners” are male or female.


I would agree. 👆 the prison service are in an impossible position. Forced to allocate dangerous males, in a female wing, afraid of the consequences of fully unleashing them on the female population, then criticised for segregating them. Either the trans-identified, and male, prisoner is placed in a solitary /segregated scenario or they are allowed to mix with “general population”. The population referenced here would appear to mean the women on the wing. The prison service would be forced to deploy staff to protect, potential, female victims.


The Prison confirms that the processes needed to protect these trans-identified males are labour intensive. Nowhere do the prison inspectors cover the issue of the risk to actual females by forcing the prison to adopt the, naive, recommendations of the Yogyakarta Principles. They do at least manage to include a reference to female staff being coerced into giving bodily searches to males. 

The prisoners have complained about mis-gendering so naturally the prison staff are also to be forced to undergo re-education programmes. Prison staff will be forced to call a violent male, with a deep seated loathing of women “Barbie”.


The prison inspectorate mandates prison staff should receive training on LGBT + issues. They do not recommend any training covering the impact, on females, of being housed with males. Males, let me remind you, with histories of violence /sex offending against women. This is despite the fact that female prisoners have been shown to be disproportionately impacted by domestic violence and sexual assaults, by men.

As far as I can ascertain the requirement to draft a new policy has not yet been undertaken or is not yet published on the Irish Prison service website. The inspectorate makes clear, in its action plan, they will be closely monitoring compliance with the LGBT+ training. This will be developed in collaboration with an appropriate civil society organisation, which, I infer, means a Trans Lobby group. The transgender prisoners will also get a voice in this training. Not the women. The Inspectorate also require attendance numbers and frequency of delivery/updates to the training programme. Big Brother is watching you!

The interesting double-think required for these policies is evident in the policy written for the Scottish Prison Service. The policy for trans-identified females, in Scotland, specifically highlights the danger of sexual assault to a female held in the male estate. Trans-identified men are invariably held in the female estate. Sex would appear to matter for the trans community after all. The Scottish policy does claim the trans-identified females should be given a choice. The other women get no choice about forcible detention with males.

Would love to see the LGBT training materials the prison are now using. They provided them, to the inspectorate, in June 2021. They don’t appear to be available on their website.

When will they listen to women’s groups?

Barbie Kardashion

Featured

This is a piece I wrote for Graham Linehan’s substack. I am including it on my blog so I can do a series on Irish Prisons.

BarbieKardashian is the adopted name by a male, with a history of sexual violence against women. Barbie is now incarcerated in a female prison in Limerick. This is possible because Ireland allows males to self-Identify as “women”.  In the United Kingdom we don’t allow self-ID but, in case you were not aware, in the UK we also house males in female prisons, on the basis of their self-declaration. This is a widely circulated photograph of ”Barbie”.

The details of this case have been subject to reporting restrictions in Ireland.  However, as it happens,  I was familiar with this person from an earlier judicial case concerning the same individual. That case centred on an appeal against a special order to detain them in a secure facility.   (Judicial Transcript linked here) 👇

Barbie Kardashian

A word about pronouns.

The legal situation in Ireland, and the journalist conventions,  means that female pronouns are used, both in the legal case and in the media. I will not be adhering to those conventions. Firstly, they are inaccurate. The use of female pronouns distort perceptions of male violence, they are an insult to his victims and, finally, I believe they do great harm to this young man himself. Males in flight from their sex are not women. These are #NotOurCrimes 

Cycles of abuse

The immediate outrage is for the women with whom  he is incarcerated, a concern I share. However,  I also want to look at the inter-generational, cycle of abuse in which this young man is ensnared. 

At the time of this case the appellant was known only by the initial G. The household is described as one of “extreme depravity and domestic violence”  Below is a flavour of his experiences when still a baby. His mother was prevented from breastfeeding him or tending to him as a baby. Both mother and son were abused by the father. I vehemently disagree with the framing of the parents as in a “sadomasochistic relationship”.  One of them may well have been a sadist. Women in abusive relationships, coerced into participating in sadomasochistic acts, can’t be assumed to be involved in consensual BDSM! 

G eventually learns that their best mode of self-protection is to ally himself with the person with the most power, unsurprisingly this is the male person.  This is described as being “recruited” by the father to also abuse his mother.  This is all the more tragic because, we are told, she was the “only source of benign interaction” 👇

This poor child was forced to perpetuate the abuse against the only person who could, in other circumstances, have been a source of comfort to him.

Anyone who has been involved in abusive family dynamics, as I have, (though to a much lesser degree), know the urge to deflect the violence in any way you can. Sometimes this means betraying your siblings. As an only child G deflected by colluding with the abuse of his mother. My own situation was rooted in my father’s history. I can certainly see the roots of his behaviour in his own experience. However, understanding the why of trauma, and cycles of abuse, should not be mistaken for excusing the perpetuation of that abuse. Women are less likely to repeat the cycle of abuse and societal influences, which fail to deal with male violence,  are a significant factor. Men are thus  given permission to externalise their trauma while women are more likely to internalise it, 

Nevertheless, the psychological toll this must have taken, on this young boy,  is heartbreaking to contemplate. However, even as a child, he become an abuser of women and disassociated from the consequences for his mother.  He learned to associate ”cold violence” with survival.

Like father, like son

By the age of nine his mother escaped to a domestic violence refuge. However there was soon concern for the level of violence G displayed against his mother. Before long this violence resulted in care proceedings which removed him from his mother’s care. There was nothing recorded to suggest his mother provided insufficient care but clearly she was unable to restrain his violence against her, or others.

There followed a series of foster placements. Each broke down. The first two because of an inability to deal with his, escalating, violence. The last one lasted around a fortnight and seems likely to have broken down for similar reasons. 

By the time he was 13 he remained in care settings and his violence had developed a sexual dimension directed at women.  This is the detail of one attack which left his female victim hospitalised.  The Gardaí (Irish police) expressed concern for female staff after this attack 👇. He attacked the social worker while she was driving tearing her eyelids all accompanied with threats to kill her.

The details of the attack are distressing. G’s response can only be described as chilling. While interviewed by the police he expressed a desire to murder his victim and showed annoyance that he had been unsuccessful adding this detail: 

Thereafter psychiatric assessments show an increasingly callous and unemotional adolescent. During the same period, from age 15, he began to identify as transgender,  seemingly after encountering another trans-identifying male at one of his placements.  Of course this begins with make-up! 

Amateur psychologists may hazard a guess at why a male, subject to male violence, and now a perpetrator of the same, may seek refuge in a kind of “rebirth”. Professional psychologists, instead, obtain a referral to a Gender Identity Clinic. 

G obtained a referral to the Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic, in London. The, thirty minute, assessment confirmed his testimony was in line with a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria. However, the clinician judged that his history was well researched, unemotional and seemed  “scripted”. A description many parents of Gender Dysphoric kids recognise. The clinician also noted that the teenager “seemed on the verge of offensive attack at all times”. 

Thereafter the judicial transcript makes repeated warnings about how this individual is a danger to women. For emphasis, I assume, some of the statements refer to the risk to females. My inference is the judge is well aware that the risk is to the female sex,  as distinct from people who merely self-identify as women.  G knows which sex to target. He is also reported as being much more compliant with male staff. Furthermore he shows a complete inability for self-reflection, which makes him unwilling to access any therapeutic interventions to help change his behaviour. 

His next statement is eerily reminiscent of a U.K. case of a pre-op, trans-identifying male. He committed attempted rape while released, on license, from prison. The mitigation offered for his offence was that he was not motivated by “sexual desire” (rape is about power not desire) but by envy of the woman for being what he was not.  I cover that case, in full, here: 👇

HOW LONG HAS THIS BEEN GOING ON?

Here is a quote from that case. Also from a judicial transcript

I see echoes of that same sentiment in this statement by G.  Their failure to be recognised as a woman and observing others happiness . 👇. This unhappiness could easily turn to jealousy and anger against women who are born women and result in escalated violence.  

The judgement also makes repeated references to G’s controlling personality and need to manipulate those around them. They instrumentalise any tool at their disposal to get their own way. This extends to manipulating clinicians in their orbit:

One  aspect of this manipulation is the  repeated threats of suicide and self harm. Yet, it is made clear, that there is no bodily evidence of self harm. Below is a statement, by G, re their threats to cut off their own genitalia. Yet the second paragraph veers off into a teen fantasy albeit focussed on a future in adult films.👇 

Another clinician, who interviewed G highlights that they are very deceptive and this makes risk assessments particularly difficult: 

Fast forward to September 2020.  G has changed his name to Barbie Kardashian. They were charged with four counts of making threats to kill, or cause serious harm,  to two  people, a woman and a man. His address was given as no fixed abode. Giving evidence via video link he was keen to emphasise his Gender Identity and fear of being put in the male estate. His legal representative presented his Gender Recognition Certificate to the court. He is already legally a woman. He has been remanded in custody, to a female prison. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

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