Vicky’s death was announced just hours before Transgender Day of Remembrance , a global event to mark the shockingly high number of trans people murdered or driven to suicide each year. Just weeks earlier, a similar case made headlines in Britain when 26-year-old Tara Hudson was placed in a men’s prison because her paperwork said she was male – despite the fact she has been living as a woman for several years and has undergone various feminizing procedures. A petition calling for Tara to be moved to a women’s facility gained over 150,000 signatures, backed by several public figures. Tara got moved. Tara is still alive.The widespread support for Tara’s transfer to a women’s prison stood in contrast to bigoted comments made by academic Germaine Greer the week before, asserting that trans women are not really women . Clearly, if Tara’s case was anything to go by, the public are quite prepared to accept trans women as women when presented with a real person and not the gross caricatures invoked by Greer to justify her exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces.It helped that Tara looked feminine. That shouldn’t matter, but it does. In the same way that a pretty girl from a middle class family might get more media attention from a news story, so, too, will a feminine trans woman gain more sympathy when lumped in with a bunch of violent men. Trans people call this “ passing privilege ”.Despite the outpouring of support for Tara, I saw some people on Twitter – and Mumsnet – question whether a woman like her, who still has a penis, should be placed with other women because she "will be a danger to vulnerable female prisoners who are biologically smaller and weaker." This is fear mongering based on stereotypes. Some trans women I know are tiny, and weak as kittens after years of hormone replacement therapy. And another thing. According to the US Department of Justice , the rate of inmate-on-inmate sexual assault is at least three times higher for women than men in America. That's right. Women abuse other women in prison. A lot. More than men do. People are the problem. Not penises.The frustrating thing is that the Ministry of Justice already has guidelines on what to do with trans prisoners. They are supposed to be placed in the prison that matches their documentation – i.e. their birth certificate or their Gender Recognition Certificate, the means by which trans people can legally change their gender. Not every trans person has a GRC, though, and the rules allow that some trans people will be "sufficiently advanced in the gender reassignment process" that they could be placed "in the estate of their acquired gender, even if the law does not yet recognise they are of their acquired gender".As trans campaigner Jane Fae notes , prison officials should also take into account: “where the prisoner would feel most comfortably housed and the reasons for this: the guidance specifically references the suicide risk for individuals placed in the estate of their birth gender”. In the case of Vicky Thompson, this was clearly ignored.