"The British Association of Gender Identity Specialists (BAGIS) made such observations in a written submission to the Trans Equality Inquiry in 2015, highlighting some concerning reasons why some prisoners may wish to exploit the system. Members of BAGIS comprise the overwhelming majority of clinicians working in every gender identity clinic in the UK. The membership is drawn from all the involved disciplines and includes speech therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, surgeons, psychosexual counsellors, nurses, occupational therapists, endocrinologists, general practitioners, and social workers. An extract from the BAGIS submission to the Trans Equality Inquiry is given below"
fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-prisoners/
“… the ever-increasing tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences. These vastly outnumber the number of prisoners incarcerated for more ordinary, non-sexual, offences. It has been rather naively suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard. I am sure that the Governor concerned would be happy to talk about this.”