Orwell's Latest Doublethink

Male Sex Predators are Female Inmates

California has reaffirmed that convicted male sex predators who have declared themselves to be women can serve their sentences in all-female prisons. The state says it is following federal law by “expressly prohibit[ing] housing decisions based solely on an incarcerated person’s external genitalia.”

Mishandling this fundamental common sense issue was a key factor in Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation last year. (Check my December 2022 article, “Does Scotland’s New Gender Law Put Women at Risk.”)

California is pushing the progressive gender boundaries with the legislation, named by its proponents as The Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act, and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021. Similar laws are also in Washington state, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City.

California does not require any medical diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." Anyone can declare on a Gender Identity Questionnaire that they are a different gender than their biological sex. The ease with which men can transfer to female prisons is set out in the portion of the law named, Housing and Searching Incarcerated People Consistent with their Gender Identity.

Although the state has spent more than $3 million on medical procedures for inmates wanting to “transition” to a different gender, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) does not require that the prisoners take any medications or have any medical procedures. The CDCR says it “does not determine an incarcerated person’s gender identity. Every incarcerated person self-identifies.”

Prisoners must serve their sentences at “an institution consistent with their gender identity.”

Of the 93,000 inmates in state prison, only 3,700 are women. A remarkable 90% of those female prisoners have a history of being beaten or battered. The state says that as of this month, there are “1,919 incarcerated people identified as transgender, non-binary and intersex.” All, of course, “based on incarcerated people who self-identify using the Gender Identity Questionnaire.” The vast majority of those are biological men.

What does California say about the safety of transferring men, even sex offenders, to female prisons? It flips the focus to the risk facing trans-identified prisoners. “Since transgender, non-binary and intersex people may be singled out for violent attacks by other incarcerated people and are at a higher risk for victimization, CDCR must make every effort to protect this vulnerable population. Housing transgender people according to their gender identity, when safe to do so, increases safety in prisons, upholds CDCR’s duty to protect all incarcerated people and promotes successful rehabilitation.”

Some commentators have suggested California convert a small prison into one exclusively for its 2,000 trans inmates. It cannot, the state claims, because a federal law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, states, “The agency shall not place lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex inmates in dedicated facilities, units, or wings solely on the basis of such identification or status …”

Of the 363 prisoners who have asked as of March 2024 to be transferred for gender, 347 are biological men. They include murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and sexual abusers. A snapshot report from 2022 revealed that one-third of those asking for a transfer to an all-women’s prison were registered sex offenders. A quarter were serving their current sentence for some sex related crime. After that report, the state stopped providing the breakdown data. (A UK study by its Ministry of Justice reported that half of transgender prisoners were sex offenders or '“dangerous category A inmates [“those that pose the most threat to the public”] In Canada, a startling 85% of “gender diverse offenders” have a history of sex crimes as men.)

Although the California law has established a cursory review process for transgender transfer requests, it does not give authority to prevent a move based only on the man’s criminal record. Last year, a report from the California Office of the Inspector General, concluded that, “If a person with a history of raping women requests to transfer to a women’s prison, this [law] may prohibit the department from denying the person’s transfer request based solely on the prospective transferee’s history of raping women.”

With this background, my primary question for the Department of Corrections was whether there have been sexual assaults by men who have transferred to all female prisons?

That state’s answer is that its “reporting mechanisms do not track assaults by gender identity.” Which means they have no idea. That is evident in a March 2024 report in which the Department of Corrections gives lip service only to “proactive measures designed to prevent sexual violence.” To make it more difficult for anyone to discover the real numbers, California offers transgender men the option of a new prison identification number.

The Geneva Convention mandates that male and female prisoners should be housed in separate facilities. That is only an interesting historical footnote in California and other gender progressive states that have embraced the movement’s two core doctrines: gender always trumps sex and self-identification determines gender.

In the case of the California prison system, it is not transgender inmates who are suffering the greatest discrimination and risk of injury. It is women who are most at risk. Putting biological men, many of them convicted sex offenders, into women’s prisons, is a misogynistic policy that at first seems so ludicrous as to be impossible. The women there have no escape from a predator. But as demonstrated in California, where trends that spread to the rest of nation often hatch, it is all too real.

Amie Ichikawa, herself a former inmate in California, works with Woman II Woman, a faith-based nonprofit that was created by formerly incarcerated women to help those still in prison and others as they are released. Ichikawa believes that biological men who pretend to be transgender are exploiting female inmates in what amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment.” She is in daily contact with women serving their time across the Golden State. It is "like they're being erased and that they do not matter at all."