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Notes -
The latter is a subset of the former.
Given how many men object to the slightest hint of femininity in a natal-anatomy!man, I suspect that they would.
No, I am promoting the idea that, when we choose to incarcerate certain persons, thus denying them the ability to either defend themselves or avoid attackers, we have assumed a corresponding duty to protect every single one of them from violent assault to the best of our abilities, and do not have the right to condemn a certain fraction of them to constant victimisation because protecting them is inconvenient.
No, I understand that it is possible that a cis-man might falsely claim to be trans in order to be moved to the trans-women's section; I merely consider this a less bad outcome than abandoning actual trans-women to the ghastly fate to which your proposed policy would lead.
A policy of providing medical care to prisoners having medical emergencies has the potential to be abused, but an occasional criminal getting away with wasting the system's resources is a less bad outcome than leaving them to die on the floor when they actually need medical intervention.
I wouldn't expect men who "discovered" their trans identity immediately prior to being convicted of a violent crime to display any hints of femininity at all. Because they're not men who have been struggling with their gender identity from a very young age, but rather ordinary violent men taking advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.
I can imagine a man who has been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria and has been cross-dressing from a very young age might have a hard time in a men's prison. I have a hard time imagining that e.g. "Isla" Bryson would face an elevated risk of victimisation in a men's prison compared to the modal prisoner. Because he is a vicious, remorseless thug whose solicitor presumably advised him to take advantage of a poorly-thought out policy.
The fact that every policy implies trade-offs does not imply that all policies are created equal. A policy which is dramatically more likely to be abused by bad actors than to be used by those who legitimately need it is a bad policy on its face. The fact that doctors are allowed to administer morphine inevitably means that some drug addicts will be administered morphine who don't really need it – but a doctor who administers morphine to every patient who requests it, no questions asked, would quickly find the ratio of drug-seeking patients to the legitimately needy becoming unacceptably large. One of the many skills a doctor must learn is distinguishing the legitimately sick from the malingerers: a doctor who failed to learn this skill would be struck off, or ought to.
Your policy would not even accomplish its own stated aims: it does not even optimise for protecting the most vulnerable prisoners. It optimises, as I said, for protecting the prisoners willing to make unfalsifiable claims about their inner psychological states, with no gatekeeping of any kind. I simply don't understand your unquestioned belief that legitimately dysphoric prisoners would be safer if housed in a facility containing every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so immediately prior to or after conviction. If you were a young man who'd been struggling with his gender identity for as long as you can remember and had partly medically transitioned, who would you rather share a cell with: a cisgender man who'd been convicted of tax evasion and who has never hurt a fly, or a vicious violent thug like "Isla" Bryson? I know how I'd pick.
I really do not how you arrived at your conclusion that the best way to protect legitimately dysphoric prisoners is to house them in a facility with every prisoner who claims to identify as female, even if they only began doing so very recently, even if they're violent offenders, even if they've been convicted of raping male victims. I genuinely don't know why you're patting yourself on the back about how compassionate your proposed policy is when to my mind it seems obviously worse at your stated aim of protecting female-presenting male prisoners, when compared to offering "focused protection" of the most vulnerable prisoners on a case-by-case basis.
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I find the differences in the conceptualisation of prisons quite interesting. To many, especially right-wingers and some conservatives, punishment is the point of prison, so some background level of victimization is, if anything, morally positive. To you and large parts of the progressive wing of the left, prison is a choice we hoist upon certain people, maybe even for some utilitarian benefit overall, but the fact that we do so against their will means we have some obligations towards them. To me, the point for me personally is simply just separation between us and them (as such, I consider exile the ideal punishment, it's unfortunately just not really available anymore); If they then choose to victimize each other, that is on them. Since anyone in prison is by definition a victimizer (technically only allegedly, I know), the oppressor-victim dichotomy is an absurdly bad match anyway. I actually prefer if they treat each other well, too, I just think we have relatively little obligation towards them. At least in my country, prisons are already more than nice enough, nor are prisoners lacking food or other amenities.
None of these conceptualisations is strictly speaking wrong, and they lend themselves to wildly different conclusions.
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