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Notes -
If trans women would be segregated in either case, why then is it important for them to be housed in a women's prison?
Otherwise, I disagree that a utilitarian calculation of which solution results in fewer rapes is the correct solution. Absent prison reform on the scale we'd both probably prefer, I will argue that being (and presenting) as a woman is a choice for trans women. They have choices they can make about how they want to interact with male prisoners. Female inmates don't have choices if trans women (many of whom I think are opportunistic and not really trans in a meaningful sense) are dumped in with them.
I wouldn't necessarily call it important, within that hypothetical. It's a matter of optics. But it's preferable, because all else being equal, I think it is morally preferable for trans women to be treated as women by society unless there are compelling practical reasons otherwise. Putting the segregated section in the women's prison sends the message of "we recognize trans women as a special category of women, although there are caveats and sometimes we won't treat them exactly like biological women". Which is about right for how the state should treat trans women in general. In contrast, making the "trans women's prison" a section of men's prison sends the message that trans women are to be regarded as a special category of men.
It's not exactly one they can walk back if they've already had breast implants, though, is it? So at the very least this wouldn't apply to post-op trans women. But I'm also skeptical that the average trans inmate could feasibly go stealth. A biological male who's been living in a female persona for years is going to have a very hard time passing for a macho man again. (This is, of course, the primary joke of The Birdcage.) She might stop broadcasting that she's a trans woman, but odds are the nearest rapist will still identify her as Some Sort Of Queer - assuming the wardens don't simply share that fact with him on purpose, see Wikipedia link in the previous message - and avail himself to her backside anyway. I guess this would dissolve the resulting rapes into the general male-on-male rape statistics, but I think that's pretty cold comfort.
And all of this is without going into the question of whether incentivizing a trans person to detrans against their will via a structural risk of rape would be a grossly unethical thing for the system to do, which I think it would be.
Well, you are right that the question is fundamentally whether trans women are a special category of women or a special category of men, and we simply disagree there.
That being said, I still think that putting trans women in women's prisons is more unjust and hazardous to women than keeping them in men's prisons is hazardous to them, at least without much more stringent requirements about who's allowed to identify as trans so they can go to a women's prison.
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