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Notes -
I see everyone arguing over "well if you make trans-women go to men's prison they'll get raped" vs "well if you make trans-women go to women's prison men will claim to be trans-women and then they'll do the raping", and these seem both pretty obviously true.
The core issue is clearly that-- in spite of the fact that prison inmates were only ever sentenced to prison, not to repeated rape and beatings-- we nevertheless tacitly allow (what you might think of as) these extrajudicial punishments to occur, and have never bothered to build any effective safeguards against that happening.
I joke with my wife about how if we really thought that prison rape should be part of the punishment for crimes that send you to prison, we should (1) make the judge explicitly add that to the convict's sentence, in those specific words, and (2) said judicially-mandated prison rape should be performed by a generously-pensioned and fundamentally disinterested civil servant on an explicit schedule.
It is, after all, hardly less barbaric to have that same punishment levied completely at random based on how physically strong or weak the prisoner is relative to their would-be rapists.
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