@Lwrenagain
On prisons:
I think it's really important to remember that female prisoners have a really different profile to male prisoners. Firstly, there are far fewer of them. Female prisoners represent around 5% of the total prison population. There is an argument that men are more likely to be convicted or sentenced to a custodial sentence, and in particular that a sentencing judge will generally do what they can to keep a mother of young children out of prison. Perhaps men are discriminated against by the criminal justice system. Or perhaps they are just more likely to commit crimes.
What is clear, however, is that women are overwhelmingly more likely to be in prison for petty and non-violent crimes, but often as repeat offenders, which explains why a custodial sentence was eventually deemed necessary. The typical profile here would be a woman who is in prison for stealing money to buy drugs. What do these women have in common? Almost all of them are victims of male violence. They are women who aren't generally dangerous, but have slipped through the cracks in society, often as a result of being physically and/or sexually abused by male family members, partners, or in the case of women who have worked as prostitutes, pimps and traffickers. As a result, the majority of these women have had bad experiences with men and are afraid of them.
Even if you remove people like Karen White and Isla Bryson from the equation, if you send a 6ft, obviously male trans woman who has been convicted of fraud to a women's prison, you're still locking vulnerable female prisoners up with a member of the opposite sex.
Personally I think it's bad enough when some women feel forced to self-exclude from women's spaces because they are no longer single sex. For example, a Muslim woman who feels that she can no longer use any of the swimming ponds at Highgate Ponds, because the ladies' pond has now been made inclusive of trans women despite the fact that there is also a mixed sex pond. It's not right or fair that a woman should feel forced to self-exclude in that situation, but she has the ability to self-exclude if she feels she needs to for her own safety or dignity.
Women in prison can't do that. They are literally locked up. Locking them up with male prisoners, regardless of the reason, how that male identifies or what they have been convicted of, is unconscionable.
Prison isn't supposed to be a gender affirming space, just like toilets aren't supposed to be gender affirming, and rape crisis groups aren't supposed to be gender affirming, and competitive sports aren't supposed to be gender affirming.
They should be safe spaces, although they frequently aren't, and there is definitely a conversation to be had about how the prison system should protect vulnerable prisoners.
But to return to Muslims, about 20 years ago a young man named Zahid Mubarek was murdered by his cell mate in Feltham young offenders' institution. It was the last day of a three month sentence for petty crime, and he had been housed in the same cell as a violent racist who had been overheard threatening to kill him.
So yes, let's protect the safety of trans women in prison, by all means. And let's do so without compromising the safety and dignity of women in prison. But if I were the mother of someone like Zahid Mubarek, I'd also want to know why trans women deserved more protection than other vulnerable male prisoners like my son.