I've been reading this thread all day and can't recall a single post where anybody has said that they consider some people to be better than others.
People should be treated equally, but equally does not always mean the same.
Tara can have all the operations she likes, but there will still be differences between her as a trans-woman and women. We can argue all we like about what those difference mean or don't mean to us, but they will still be there and as has already been mentioned, in places like rape crisis centres and prisons, those differences matter a lot.
All prisoners have the right to be safe in the space they are incarcerated in. That's equality. That doesn't mean that the best and only solution for keeping everybody safe in this case was to put Tara in a women's prison. Because ensuring one prisoners safety at the possible expense of many others is not equality.
There is talk of pre-op and post-op, but which op are we really talking about when we say that? Tara isn't going to hurt anybody with her breast op, but she could cause significant damage in a women's prison with her fully functioning penis.
There has also been talk of segregation to keep certain prisoners safe from others. This could have been just as easily achieved by segregating Tara in the prison she was first sent to. She apparently wrote to her mother to say she was ok in that prison, and with this highly publicised case I have no doubt she would have continued to be ok.
Tara is a violent person with several convictions, apparently making a living as a sex worker because she still has a fully working penis.
Her mother was quoted as saying that Tara changed her plea to guilty in the belief that she would receive an electronic tag and a referral to an alcohol abuse course.
Instead she has been incarcerated and the cynic in me wonders if this appeal was really to force the issue of the prison service not knowing quite where to put her in the hope of her being released with the tag and referral she had expected to receive.
I bear her no ill will. I wouldn't want her to be harmed in prison. Equally I wouldn't want her to harm anybody else, something she sadly has other convictions for.
Segregation seems the best option to protect both Tara from the other inmates and the other inmates from Tara. All prisons should be able to do this successfully regardless of the sex, gender (or anything else) of the inmates they house.
If that segregation could not have been done in the original prison Tara was sent to then we need to be discussing the issue of why not and how best we can change that, for the wellbeing of all prisoners. Because that's equality.