22 United States The EconomistJanuary 30th 2021
2 of Mr Trump. Yet they appear to have con-
cluded the former president’s grip on their
party is too strong for this to be done with-
out damaging their or its prospects.
“Waste of time impeachment isn’t
about accountability,” tweeted Marco Ru-
bio of Florida, whose combination of good
intentions and spinelessness before Mr
Trump has made him a useful Republican
bellwether. “It’s about demands from [sic]
vengeance from the radical left.” Tell that to
the victims of the insurrection Mr Trump is
alleged to have incited: including the five
people who died during it and three more—
including two police officers—who have
since committed suicide.
Tell it to the ten Republican House
members who, setting aside fears for their
careers and physical safety, voted to im-
peach him. Or tell it to Mr Rubio’s five brav-
er Senate colleagues who voted for the trial:
Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse
and Pat Toomey, as well as Mr Romney. If
all, or even most, of them join the Demo-
crats in voting to convict, Mr Trump’s sec-
ond impeachment trial will at the least
have been nothing like the partisan affair
that Mr Rubio described.
A bipartisan group of senators, led by
Ms Collins of Maine and Tim Kaine of Vir-
ginia, is exploring the possibility of a lesser
rap across Mr Trump’s knuckles, in the
form of censure motion, which would in
theory need only a simple majority to pass.
But the Republicans could still filibuster it.
And it is unclear whether even a successful
censure vote could presage the additional
vote to ban Mr Trump from office under the
14th amendment that Mr Kaine wants.
The Republicans’ decision to protect Mr
Trump is depressing but not illogical. He
has already threatened from exile to launch
a new party. A poll this week suggested
three in 10 Republicans would join it. This
is not the only indication that, after a brief
dip in his ratings after the insurrection, Mr
Trump is as popular with Republican vot-
ers as ever. Arizona’s Republican Party has
formally censured two of its most venera-
ble members, Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain,
after both endorsed Joe Biden. Its counter-
parts in Texas and Hawaii have defended or
appeared to adopt the slogans of QAnon
conspiracists (then later recanted or de-
nied having done so).
On January 25th Rob Portman of Ohio
became the third mainstream conservative
senator—after Richard Burr of North Caro-
lina and Mr Toomey of Pennsylvania—to
announce he would not stand again in- The intraparty contest to succeed
them has already begun. It will pit estab-
lishment against Trumpist candidates (one
of whom, in North Carolina, is expected to
be the former president’s daughter-in-law,
Lara Trump) and be an important indica-
tion of whether the party’s drift towards
hard-right populism is reversible. 7
K
arla bello, a care assistant in Florida,
had been living as a woman for years
when she missed a court hearing following
a series of traffic violations, failed to pay
bail and wound up in a male jail. There, the
guards called her “sir” and confiscated her
bra and “gaff” (a piece of fabric used to hide
male genitalia), leaving her feeling humili-
ated. Worse, she says, she was denied ac-
cess to the cross-sex hormones to which
she had become habituated, inducing
chest pains and intense anxiety. Putting
transgender women in men’s prisons can
be cruel. It is also, in an already dangerous
environment, perilous: research suggests
that transgender inmates are much more
likely than other prisoners to be assaulted.
A growing awareness of this, combined
with activists’ call for transgender people
to be recognised as members of the gender
with which they identify, is leading to
changes in the way trans prisoners are
housed. In most cases, such inmates (the
majority of whom are trans women) are in-
carcerated with members of their biologi-
cal sex. But this month, California intro-
duced a law allowing prisoners to request
to be housed in accordance with their gen-
der identity. Similar policies have been in-
troduced elsewhere after transgender in-
mates sued for mistreatment.
Trans activists’ insistence that trans
women be treated as women is also influ-
encing federal lawmakers. On his first day
in the White House, President Joe Biden is-sued an executive order directing agencies
to consider anti-discrimination measures
in which he said that “children should be
able to learn without worrying about
whether they will be denied access to the
restroom, the locker room or school
sports.” The Equality Act, which he has
promised to make law, would redefine the
“sex” of the amendments of the Civil Rights
Act to include “gender identity” (that is, a
person’s sense of their gender regardless of
whether they have taken cross-sex hor-
mones or undergone surgery). The logical
outcome of that would seem to be admit-
ting trans women to spaces once reserved
for women, from sports teams to prisons.
America needs federal legislation to
protect trans people from discrimination:
in many states there may be nothing illegal
about a landlord refusing to rent an apart-
ment to a trans person, for example. But
policies grounded in the flawed conflation
of biological sex and gender identity will
lead to more problems than they solve, be-
cause they create a clash between the rights
of women and those of trans women.
Prisons offer a particularly worrying ex-
ample of this. There are two obvious pro-
blems with putting trans women in female
prisons. The first concerns safety. Most
trans women pose no threat to women. But
denying the reality of biological sex ig-
nores the fact that men are much the more
violent of the two sexes. In America they
commit 90% of murders and constitute
92% of the prison population. There is no
evidence that trans women have lower lev-
els of criminality than men.
California’s Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation (cdcr) says the 130-plus
prisoners who have so far requested they
switch prisons (out of a trans population of
around 1,000) are “predominantly” trans
women. (This may also be because there
are fewer trans men). Inmates’ requests toWASHINGTON, DC
Trans people need protecting in
prisons. So do womenTrans women in prisonsPrisoners’
dilemma
Karla Bello, test case