A teenage Irish transsexual with a history of threating violence and rape to females will stay in a women's jail in County Limerick.
Barbie Kardashian, 18, of no fixed abode, appeared before Limerick District Court for the second time on Tuesday via video link from the women's section of Limerick Prison, The Journal reported.
Prosecuting Garda Sergeant Sean Moloney said the gardaí, Ireland's police force, would make “strenuous objections” if she was released on bail, but said the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) was yet to instruct him on how to proceed in the case.
Kardashian, born Alejandro Gabriel Gentile, is charged with four counts of making threats to kill or cause serious harm towards a man and a woman.
The defendant first appeared before the court on Friday, when her solicitor Michele Finan produced a “certificate of gender recognition”, an official document certifying she now lives as a woman.
Kardashian was “very anxious she be detained in a prison facility for females, as she identifies as a female”, Finan said on Friday, claiming her client had “made some statements that she did intend to do some harm to herself”.
Judge Marian O’Leary ordered Kardashian remanded until October 13 to await the DPP's instructions.
The case prompted activists to question why a dangerous male-bodied offender is being locked up in a female-only space.
— Grace O'Malley 🏁 (@you_know_nuttin) September 29, 2020
— Allison Bailey (@BluskyeAllison) September 29, 2020
— Allison Bailey (@BluskyeAllison) September 29, 2020
In 2015, months before first identifying as transgender, Gentile attacked a woman working at her care home and was seen to display “extreme and excessively sexualised behaviour towards female staff”.
In 2018, Kardashian launched a vicious attack on another social worker who was driving her to a new home, declaring “I am going to kill you” as she tore out clumps of the woman's hair and tried to gouge out her eyes. She told a psychiatrist after her arrest that she planned to murder care workers.
Professor Harry Kennedy, who later assessed Kardashian, said she engaged in “acts of physical and sexual violence which at times are instrumental – prepared and goal directed – particularly towards women”.
Ireland's 2015 Gender Recognition Act allows individuals to be legally treated as members of the opposite biological sex on the basis of 'self-identification', without having to undergo gender reassignment surgery or hormone treatment.
Last week the UK government withdrew proposed changes to its own Gender Recognition Act to allow self-identification, although transsexuals can still be legally recognised after living as their assumed sex for two years without undergoing surgery.
In 2018, Karen White, a recently self-identified trans woman and convicted paedophile who was on remand for multiple rapes and grievous bodily harm, was sent to New Hall women's prison in Yorkshire, UK, despite not being legally recognised as female. She sexually assaulted two fellow inmates before she was transferred out to a men's prison.
