Tara Pearsall is a pathological liar and repeat sexual offender who preyed on young girls via the internet.
She specialized in impersonating a paramedic, a ruse that allowed her to perform vaginal exams on witless and terribly naive young women. She has claimed variously and falsely to have been HIV positive (seeking accommodation at a specialist clinic), diabetic, and suffering from chronic myeloid leukemia, for which she’d undergone chemotherapy treatment. (Also a complete invention.)
Pearsall did all those things before she was a she, having lived an entire life as a male.
As a man — his name was Patrick Pearsall — he was placed on the Sex Offender Registry.
In 2018, upon conviction for two sexual assaults, Pearsall was given a fixed sentence of 10 years and declared a dangerous offender.
Three years earlier, Pearsall had self-identified as female. And, as an inmate, she was moved promptly to the Milton-Vanier Centre for Women. Despite the fact, as her fat custodial file showed, she’d admitted to cellmates and other individuals that she preferred being incarcerated as a woman, because that meant doing easier time, and feared being raped in a men’s institution. Despite the fact she still had male anatomy and was a proven rapist.
Moka Dawkins — sworn into court as Curtis Gordon Dawkins — was a sex trade worker convicted in 2018 of manslaughter in the repeated stabbing death of a client. Although she had self-identified as a transgender woman since moving to Toronto from Montreal in 2015, Dawkins chose to do her time in a men’s prison. “I was told that if I went to a women’s institution, I would be kept in segregation,” Dawkins told The Huffington Post in a story published last month. “Although I didn’t really know what I was signing up for, I knew that I didn’t want to end up in segregation, so I decided to go to a men’s jail ... Seg is the worst. You’re locked in a room by yourself all day with no mirror and reduced phone privileges. It starts to make you depressed.”
In court documents, Dawkins alleged she’d endured more than a dozen physical attacks at two Toronto jails amidst a culture of transphobic abuse. “There are times when a guard has said something transphobic and that only encourages the other inmates to do the same,” she told The Huffington Post.
She filed a complaint that is before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.
On the eve of her parole release for the manslaughter conviction last May, Dawkins was hit with new charges — accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a cellmate. She has emphatically denied it. A judge released her on bail pending trial.
It is indisputable that transgender people experience a distinct hardship behind prison wire, a magnification of the broader societal discrimination, abuse and humiliation to which they are subjected. That was the impetus behind Bill C-16, passed by the Liberals in 2017, which added gender identity and expression to the Criminal Code and the Human Rights Act. They have the right to be addressed by their preferred pronouns. Prior to the bill’s passage, only men who’d undergone sexual-reassignment surgery could be considered for accommodation in a women’s federal prison. Under present rules, an offender will be eligible for reassignment surgery if they have lived in an “identity-congruent” gender role for 12 continuous months and the move is recommended by a specialist physician.
Genital surgery is not a determining factor anymore for transfer to a female prison — and by far the majority of inmates seeking accommodation are male-to-female.
The first individual who benefited from the legislation, and it was certainly a historical marker, was Fallon Aubee, a transgender offender serving a life sentence at Mission Institution in B.C., transferred to Fraser Valley Institution for Women. Aubee was convicted of first-degree murder in a street-gang contract killing case. She had fought an uphill battle for such minor matters — not minor to her of course — as access to women’s clothing and toiletries along with single-cell privacy at the male institution.
But transgender offenders are a tiny subset within the prison population. This week’s release of the 46th Annual Report of the Correctional Investigator — basically an ombudsman for federally sentenced offenders — notes that as of March 2018 there were 58 individuals in federal custody who “required accommodation on consideration of gender identity or expression.” Most, 67 per cent, are classified as medium-security; 75 per cent as “high needs”; 65 per cent as high risk; and 63 per cent with low reintegration potential. Nearly two-thirds, according to the report, are currently residing within male institutions.
The legislation, tapered to admirable aspirations of tolerance, has nothing to say about the consequences of introducing women with male anatomy, however small their number, into an all-female environment where many if not most of the inmates have suffered sexual assault and violence by men, often at the hands of intimate partners, and disproportionately among Indigenous detainees. Some are fundamentally fearful of men. Now they’re living in close quarters with people they may see as men, in penal institutions where inmate-on-inmate (and inmate-on-guard) violence is common. It is not really a safe space and now potentially less safe than before, in the company of trans inmates who are stronger and with, as the data from the correctional investigator’s report indicates, a strong propensity for violence.
Under the legislation, all it takes to trigger a relocation, is an individual self-identifying, unless there is an overriding health or safety concern. And guess what? Cons lie. Everybody wants to do easier time. Female institutions are notably less punishing. From my experience, parole boards are more inclined to accept that female offenders have rehabilitated themselves behind bars and pose a lesser risk if released. It’s an inside-out gender bias: The overriding belief that violence committed by women, including murder, is an aberration.
You think some male offenders aren’t cunning enough to want a piece of that action?
While trans offenders have become something of a cause célèbre, few have taken on the burden of speaking for incarcerated women who feel threatened by trans women. Feminists who have raised alarms are shouted down and vilified. There appears little room for compromise or an admission of reality.
To cite but one example that has received wide media coverage is the case of Tara Desousa, who was declared Canada’s youngest-ever dangerous offender in 1999, age 17. As a 15-year-old, Desousa — who then identified as Adam Laboucan — raped a 3-month old boy, the baby requiring reconstructive surgery, so horrific were his injuries. She has also admitted to murdering a three-year-old when she was 11.
Desousa, who’s said on social media that she no longer has a penis, has been repeatedly denied parole. Yet, as a trans female, she is residing — as per latest information — at a women’s prison that participates in the Institutional Mother-Child Program, an initiative whereby moms who are serving time can raise their kids in prison full-time to the age of four.
What about the rights of those women and their children?
In his report, Ivan Zinger, the correctional investigator, acknowledges “operational challenges” for penal institutions trying to accommodate trans inmates. “Some women offenders have expressed concern to my Office for their safety when a transgender female is transferred to a women’s institution,” Zinger writes. “The concern raised in understandable, particularly given that most federally sentenced women have experienced significant trauma, sexual and physical abuse in their lives. Nor can manipulation be ruled entirely out as a motivation for a male inmate expressing a desire to live as a transgender individual. Though malingering does not appear to be a sizable problem, it is an important consideration in deciding whether to place a transgender person in a women’s institution. Ultimately, the more vexing cases, the courts may have to intervene to provide guidance.”
Yet Zinger seems at least equally preoccupied with inmate searches — frisks, strip searches — which “can be particularly distressing for transgender individuals, even though, under Correctional Services protocols, transgender inmates can choose the gender of the person conducting the search and, when necessary, these can be performed in a two-step approach, “first above and then below the waist to provide for more dignity and privacy.”
Laws, and the courts that apply them, are often about balancing duelling rights — in this instance the laudable objective of dignity for trans people and the legitimate worries of women in penal institutions.
But the latter have been given short shrift. I guess not a whole lot of activists or politicians give a whole lot of damn about them.
