The Democratic Party refused to grapple with these questions either and their electoral loss is going to do far more harm to trans rights than some reasonable policies (for example some gatekeeping of "self-ID") would have.
Prisons should of course have safeguarding policy for further separation of vulnerable inmates within the prison.
Interestingly this is exactly what male prisoners with a transgender identity were requesting, according to https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/chase-strangio...:
> He teamed up with Lorena Borjas, the unofficial den mother to transgender Latinx women in New York City, to start the bail fund for transgender immigrants, and he joined a working group of lawyers who were drafting recommendations for President Obama's Department of Justice on the incarceration of trans people. "We asked people in prison what they needed, and they all said that they wanted a trans unit," Strangio said. But the lawyers in the working group, including Strangio, believed that L.G.B.T. units were stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system.
However they were ignored, and instead of this, a policy of transferring males to women's prisons was introduced.