@DuploTower
The following facts are taken from Ministry of Justice data.
Most men are in prison for violent crime. Most women in prison are there for financial crime.
95% of prisoners are male. 5% of prisoners are female.
More than 98% of sex offending is committed by males. Less than 2% is committed by females.
There are 13,500 men in prison for sex offending from an overall male population of 32 million. There are 126 women in prison for sex offending from an overall female population of 32 million. There were at least 60 transwomen in prison for sex offending in 2016 from an estimated population of 200,000 - for the offending rates to be the same as female, that population should be 16 million. When people claim transwomen offend at male rates, that is, quite simply, a provable lie. They do not.
The Ministry of Justice has noted that the number of male prisoners claiming trans identity has exponentially increased in the past four years: it's now 1 in 50 male prisoners. Rhona Hotchkiss, the SNP politician, was a Governor of a woman's prison. She has testified before the Scottish Parliament that there are now more transwomen sex offenders jailed than natal women.
More than half the women in prison have been subjected to male violence. A majority were abused in childhood by men. Many have been prostituted by men. They have extremely good reason to fear men. Women who end up in prison tend to come from traumatic backgrounds. Trauma inflicted, again, by men. They need and deserve female only provision. Instead, it is suggested that they should be locked in with rapists. Some have already been locked in with rapists, in fact.
Again, one in fifty men in the male estate now claim to identify as women. If Nandy were ever in power, and implemented this policy, that would mean almost a third of prisoners in women's prisons would be male, including any sex offender, or domestic abuser - even if that abuse ended in the death of the woman concerned. It would include any level of criminality, as Nandy has made it clear that she regards any male to claim trans status as a woman on that basis.
@R0wantrees quotes:
2015 Written evidence to parliamentary Transgender Equality Inquiry by Dr James Barrett President of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists.
"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. I am sure that the Governor concerned would be happy to talk about this."
Transwomen are not female. They are male. Lying about that causes the avoidable and serious abuse of women. We know, because there have been prison rapes of women by transwomen in several countries. Nandy is saying that pretending biology is not real is more important than protecting women from rape. It also gaslights some very vulnerable women, who know exactly what a man is, and have already suffered at male hands. Abused women are often bullied into accepting the abuser's reality - coercive control and gaslighting. To tell them that people everyone knows are male are women is to continue that in particularly grotesque fashion. It is the state gaslighting and abusing vulnerable women, in a context where they cannot escape. People are literally moving rapists into a locked environment with women, claiming that it's okay because they have a woman's penis. How is the insanity of that not immediately apparent?
Women are very rarely violent criminals. Men are not uncommonly violent criminals. Men are much stronger and larger than women on average. Transition does not alter that. Women are genuinely vulnerable to men. This is why the debate is all around placing transwomen in women's prisons. It is openly admitted that you could not place a transman in a male prison because the risk would not be manageable. This is because the risk assessment prioritises the prisoner in question, and not the population they are to moved into.
All prison reform charities note that the policy places women at risk in both psychological and physical terms. This article is by the head of one such charity, and I would urge you to read it.