A post on the subject of Prisons
this is an adapted version of a post that appeared on another thread
When we discuss how society should handle crime committed by male people who claim they should serve their sentences in women's prisons, trans activists often resort to lofty, idealistic phrasing about focusing on crime committed by males who don't identify as trans first.
So what does that look like, in terms of policy? By how much must male violence against women and girls be reduced before violence by trans-identifying offenders in historically single-sex spaces becomes worthy of preventing? Whatever your figure, what is the gameplan for eliminating that percentage of violence against women and girls?
What is the timescale for this?
Currently, women are being abused by male offenders in prison. How long do they have to wait before they are worth the effort of protecting? When you do your mental arithmetic, take into account that these rapes and sexual assaults are some of the simplest to prevent. All you have to do is separate prisons by sex again!
It can be done with the stroke of a pen.
Would you be willing to listen to the testimony of a woman currently locked in a building with a convicted rapist, and tell her that you don't think her physical and psychological welfare is worth the effort of moving those males into the male estate?
No-one ever says bullying in school shouldn't be addressed until we've eliminated malaria, so why is it acceptable to say incarcerated women.have to wait until everything else in the world has been tackled.
When we have threads on prisons, some person self-identifying as a cleverclogs usually makes a fool of themselves by asking whether I ever cared about prison welfare before this issue came to the fore. Often in a highly patronising tone, with the clear expectation that they're going to trigger some kind of Damascene moment for me in which I'll realise that female prisoners don't matter.
Tonight, for the sake of my own bloody blood pressure, I'm going to pre-empt that. The answer is yes. In fact, I have cared about prison welfare since I was seven years old. Why seven? Because that was the first time my mother ever told me in any detail what her time in prison had been like. In the following years, I discovered that other adults I valued deeply, both female and male, had also served prison sentences. I do hope that's good enough for you.
I don't particularly need flower emojis, but donations to Keep Prisons Single Sex are always nice.
For those who have the emotional perspicacity of a dead sheep, this longheld knowledge means that I have always been aware than incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are... people! (Although my mother didn't believe that this applied to sex offenders and she brought me up to have no sympathy whatsoever. 
)
Every single person in there is someone's daughter or son. The adults in my life wanted better for me than the lives they'd had, and they seem to have succeeded (unless I get arrested and imprisoned for calling men, men, at any rate!) but none of us know what the future holds for our own daughters and granddaughters.
Are you happy to turn a blind eye to your granddaughter being sexually assaulted in prison? Mine? The daughter of your sister's best friend?
What lies at the root of this lack of empathy for women? Is it people feeling guilty at saying no to particular subset of male prisoners? Why? The general public doesn't normally have any problem saying no to male prisoners asking for better food, more investment in educational facilities, and so on.
I can say, totally guilt-free, "I don't think you should be housed in the female estate. If you are in danger in the male estate, then separate units should be established for the use of trans-identifying male prisoners, in the male estate."
To be fair, I'd fear for my physical safety if I said it to someone like Karen White (who was placed in a women's prison with a mother and baby unit after being charged for raping a woman on a locked psychiatric ward. He injured her so badly she will never be able.to have children) or Tiffany Scott (Scotland's most violent male prisoner) but I wouldn't feel a drop of guilt. I'd feel a lot of guilt at ushering either of them into a room with another woman and locking the door though. And so I should!
Is it instinctive fear of violent reprisal that means you fear saying no to these prisoners when they demand to be in the women's estate? Do you realise you are using other women as your shield against these scary males? How can you feel comfortable with that?
I could never say to a woman, "I am going to let you get raped, in order to stop this man getting angry with me because he's terrifying".
extract from Keep Prisons Single Sex
“Being in prison with male prisoners, you always feel on edge. You know something could happen at any time. We know they are not women. They are physically threatening and aggressive. I was sexually assaulted and I am not the only woman who has been. They haven’t had surgery and they expose themselves. One of them had been told he couldn’t shower at the same time as us women. He made a formal complaint and said this was a breach of his human rights. So now he is allowed to shower with us. And because he now has that right, the other males have that right too. There’s only a shower curtain between us. He moves the curtain so we can all see his penis when he is washing himself or shaving his legs. This is disgusting and I think it is disgusting that the prison allows this.
We can’t complain about anything. They are very well protected and it feels like our rights as women just don’t count. We have to call them ‘she’ and ‘her’ and have to use their female names. If we don’t, we are punished and lose our enhanced prisoner or D-Category status. It is horrible to do that to women.
I am very upset that I lost my legal case. I can’t understand how anyone can say that imprisoning males alongside women is the right thing to do. The prisoner who attacked me was convicted of the most serious sexual offences against girls and still has his penis. How can the government say that putting him in prison with women is the right thing to do? It’s not. I am out of prison now. But I think about all the other women still in prison who have to live with these males. This is dangerous, disgusting and wrong.”