Clearly they've never read this thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3348290-It-will-never-happen-resource-thread
I'll refer to James Kirkup's brilliant piece last year following Karen White's violence:
blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/are-female-prisoners-at-risk-from-transgender-inmates/
*There are other cases where it has been reported that male-born criminals have been admitted to the women’s prison estate and caused harm and distress to women. In April this year, Andrea Albutt, president of the Prison Governors Association, told a Commons committee about the consequences of allowing male-bodied prisoners into the female prison estate:
“I have seen women very scared in the situation of somebody who has a male body but identifies as a woman coming into a female prison or potentially coming into a female prison.”
Hers is not a lone voice. Not long ago, I spoke to someone in a senior position in the Ministry of Justice who told me that the risks presented by transgender prisoners in the female estate were not being adequately managed; according to this person, there were several cases where male-born inmates had transferred to the female estate on grounds of gender reassignment, and subsequently committed acts of sexual violence against female inmates. Have either the managers of the prisons system or the politicians to whom they answer taken the issues that raise such fears seriously enough? Again, an open question.*
And
*psychologists working with forensic patients are aware of a number of cases where men convicted of sex crimes have falsely claimed to be transgender females for a number of reasons:
· As a means of demonstrating reduced risk and so gaining parole;
· As a means of explaining their sex offending aside from sexual gratification (e.g. wanting to ‘examine’ young females);
· Or as a means of separating their sex offending self (male) from their future self (female).
· In rare cases it has been thought that the person is seeking better access to females and young children through presenting in an apparently female way.
Such strategies in no way affect risk and indeed may increase it.
Some people falsely believe that taking oestrogen and blocking androgen in males will reduce risk of offending, however this is not necessarily the case.*
And
*The committee also heard from James Barrett. Dr Barrett is the lead clinician at the Gender Identity Clinic at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, recognised by many people as the foremost NHS centre for the treatment of medical issues relating to gender variance. He is also the editor and main psychiatric author of the standard United Kingdom textbook in this area, and at the time was president of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists. It was in the last capacity that he submitted evidence to the select committee, writing on behalf of BAGIS, a group of clinicians and other health professionals committed to “the promotion of excellence in transgender healthcare”. In short, Dr Barrett can reasonably be described as a leading expert in this field, and an expert whose entire professional effort is focussed on the welfare and wellbeing of transgender people. This is what he wrote about transgender people and the prison estate:
'The criminal justice system merits quite a bit of thinking about. On the one hand, many of us can remember patients who were charged with crimes, convicted and who ended up on the sex offenders register when we thought that the same thing wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t a trans person.
The converse is the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences. These vastly outnumber the number of prisoners incarcerated for more ordinary, non-sexual, offences.
It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this.
These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard.'
In summary, a representative body for psychologists and the leading expert in the field, speaking for other experts, submitted clear and quite extensive evidence to Parliament suggesting that some male sex-offending criminals have attempted to exploit existing gender-change rules for harmful and illegitimate purposes and that others are likely to attempt to do so in future.*