Advocates for female prisoners are sounding the alarm as a newly introduced law in California is allowing male prisoners to be transferred into women’s facilities if they say they identify as female, regardless of whether they’ve received hormone therapy or gender reassignment surgery.

Quick Facts

• Senate Bill 132, which took effect on January 1, allows prisoners to request which facility they will be placed in based on how they identify.
• WoLF, a radical feminist group, says the policy puts female prisoners at risk as biologically male prisoners transfer to their facilities.
• Advocacy groups point to the violent records of some self-identified transgender inmates who have been transferred into women’s prisons.

While California’s Senate Bill 132 was passed into law in the name of making transgender inmates more comfortable, female inmates, prison guards, and even other transgender prisoners are facing serious degrees of discomfort.

“Under the law as written, there is no method to screen out males who genuinely self-identify as transgender from those who are using the system to prey on women,” the radical feminist group Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) wrote in an open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom regarding the new policy.

WoLF says that at least 28 biological males are now housed in California’s two women’s prisons, an increase from just two before the new law was passed.

Meanwhile, a newly formed advocacy group for female prisoners, Women II Women, says that they’re receiving “hundreds of distressed messages from our sisters inside” since the law went into effect. “They are scared, angry, confused and in disbelief that legislators completely left them out of a decision that affects their mental health and safety 24 hours a day,” the group wrote in a letter.   

Just the News found eight prisoners who self-identify as women housed in female facilities, including one Jessica Marie Hann, born Jason Michael Hann, who received the death sentence in 2019 for killing his infant daughter. An additional 10 male prisoners in female prisons have been convicted of such crimes as aggregated sexual assault of a child and continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14. 

WoLF’s letter pointed to research indicating that 20 percent of transgender inmates are sex offenders, as well as a 30-year study of men who identify as women who “retained a male pattern regarding criminality” after undergoing hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery.

Moreover, female prison guards are also concerned they’ll be forced to perform cavity searches on men or risk being fired.

California’s legislation puts female prisoners at risk of bodily harm and the most humiliating and violent form of abuse for the sake of male prisoners. 

This is, by definition, sexist.

There is a reason that when it comes to sports and prisons, we only ever discuss concerns over the entry of males into female-only spaces, as it is only women who are put at risk by such policies. One wonders how many women who identify as men are begging to be placed in men’s corrections facilities?

No matter how individuals may identify, males maintain a physical advantage over women in the vast majority of cases, and one certainly imagines this would still be the case in prison.

We already know that men who identify as women retain a pattern of male criminality, what’s more, contrary to what many often assume, the large majority of men who identify as women are attracted to women — 60 percent, in fact, according to a 2015 survey, while another 20 percent say they are bisexual.

Sexual assault is already a serious concern in both male and female prison facilities. We are told that these policies help protect the lives of transgender prisoners, and this is a valid concern as well.

But it is in no way, shape, or form beneficial to anyone but sexual predators to not take additional measures to protect the most vulnerable prisoners, in this case, biological women, from those who would seek to exploit such “tolerant” policy changes for the sake of “wokifying” prisons.