More transgender convicts than ever are making their way to women’s prisons, a victory for the gender identity movement but not necessarily for female inmates forced to share their living spaces with the new arrivals.
Take convicted murderer Janiah Monroe, formerly Andre Patterson, who won a transfer to the Logan Correctional Center for women in Illinois after years of harassment, physical assault and sexual abuse in the men’s prison, according to the 2019 complaint.
Shortly thereafter, Monroe stopped hormone therapy, threatened other inmates and became sexually active, a prison psychiatrist testified. Another prisoner accused Monroe of rape. Monroe’s attorney said the accusations are “part of a campaign to get her removed from Logan.”
Concerns about transgender safety are fueling legislation, policies and lawsuits to assign prison housing based on gender identity, but advocates for incarcerated women argue that such measures only trade the welfare of one vulnerable population for another.
“There’s no concern for the women involved at all. They’re just completely a footnote in this whole thing,” said Lauren Adams, legal director of the Women’s Liberation Front, a feminist group advocating for single-sex prisons.
As viewers of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” are aware, transgender inmates like Laverne Cox’s character, Sophia, in women’s prisons are nothing new. The 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act identified transgender status as a risk factor and provided a limited avenue for transfers on a case-by-case basis.
Under the latest advocacy wave, however, such housing assignments would become the rule rather than the exception.
Of the 156,000 prisoners in the federal system, 1,277 are transgender. Of those, 916 are biological males who identify as female, according to Justice Department data from December posted by the nonprofit advocacy group Keep Prisons Single Sex, based in the United Kingdom.
Joseph R. Biden declared on the campaign trail in 2019 that “in prison, the determination should be that your sexual identity should be defined by what you say it is, not what in fact the prison says it is.”
Reports that the Biden administration is considering executive action to assign inmates based on gender identity prompted Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, to introduce legislation last month prohibiting the Federal Bureau of Prisons from “housing prisoners with persons of the opposite sex.”
In February 2021, the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, “which would make this nationwide in federal and state facilities, local jails, everywhere. So it’s very, very concerning,” Ms. Adams said.
Democratic states take lead
Democratic-led states are already taking action. Last year, Maine Gov. Janet Mills signed legislation requiring state prisons to house inmates “consistent with the person’s gender identity.” Similar bills were passed in Connecticut in 2018 and California in 2020.
The latest front is Maryland. House Bill 453 would require the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services to house inmates who identify as transgender, nonbinary or intersex at facilities “designed for men or women based on the inmate’s preference.”
The sponsor is Delegate Lesley J. Lopez, Montgomery County Democrat. She cited a 2018 National Center for Transgender Equality study that found transgender inmates were 10 times more likely than inmates in the general prison population to be sexually assaulted and that 40% had been sexually assaulted in the previous year.
To protect their safety, prisons often place transgender inmates in restricted housing units that keep them segregated from the male population, but also isolated.
“HB 453 works to improve Maryland’s correctional facilities by making changes that will ensure that everyone who is housed is not subject to discrimination and violence as a result of who they are,” Ms. Lopez said at a Feb. 8 House Judiciary Committee hearing.
Critics countered that the legislation, modeled on a California bill, would put female convicts at risk of sharing cells with unaltered, female-attracted biological males who may be serving time for violent offenses or even sexual assaults.
“No crimes render someone off-limits for cross-sex housing in this bill,” Amanda Stulman, USA director of Keep Prisons Single Sex, said at the hearing.
The measure includes no requirement for sex-reassignment surgery or hormone therapy. Denying housing placement based on anatomy or sexual orientation would be forbidden, and female guards would have to conduct searches on male-born inmates who don’t identify as men.
“If you support this bill, you are signing on to males with intact genitalia or with sexual paraphilias or incarcerated for violent sex crimes — or all of the above — being housed with women if that’s their preference,” said Ms. Stulman. “That may sound outlandish, but those are all scenarios permitted under this bill.”
Supporters insist the legislation has safeguards. The department may deny an inmate’s search or housing preferences “due to specific articulable management or security concerns,” which must be certified in writing, according to the bill.
“I can’t and won’t prove that every trans woman is not a danger to cis people, but I can ensure that there are fail-safes built into the legislation that allow for the legitimate denial of a housing request, including past sexual offenses,” said Jamie Grace Alexander, policy director of FreeState Justice in Baltimore. “I can strongly argue that transgender women present no inherent danger to ciswomen.”
Female prisoners as ‘human shields’
Maryland has 38 transgender inmates, but Women’s Liberation Front board member Kacie Mills predicted the bill “would absolutely open a floodgate of men seeking to enter women’s prisons.”
Advocates fear that scenario is playing out in California.
Since Senate Bill 132 took effect last year, 295 inmates in California men’s institutions have requested gender identity moves to women’s prisons, and 43 have been approved as of Jan. 25. Nine were denied, and 18 changed their minds, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Those figures represent a small percentage of the state’s male prison population, which numbers 93,000. Not so with the female population, which numbers 3,677. The California law sets up a potential situation in which more than 7% of women’s prison inmates are male-born.
In November, the Women’s Liberation Front sued the department on behalf of four female inmates, claiming that the transfers violate their rights and “have resulted in intimidation, sexual harassment, physical assaults, and sexual assaults committed by the men against female inmates.”
Like the Maryland bill, the California law bans discrimination against prisoners based on anatomy. That means inmates must be accommodated even if they have not undergone surgery or hormone therapy and have no plans to do so.
“You don’t even have to identify as a woman. They can identify as something else, as long as it’s not a man,” said Ms. Adams. “There are men in the women’s prison in California who identify as nonbinary. They’re not on hormones. They’re just men. It’s insane. One of them is serving a life sentence for a violent crime. It’s just completely upside down.”
California corrections spokesperson Terry Thornton said “the department is committed to providing a safe, humane, rehabilitative and secure environment for all people in its custody” while complying with federal and state legal obligations for the treatment of “gender-nonconforming people.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener, the Democrat who sponsored the California bill, chalked up the opposition to a “right-wing backlash” and “TERFs,” which stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
“It’s just very unfortunate, these anti-transgender attacks,” Mr. Wiener said at an August hearing. “They’re claiming that transwomen are actually not real women and are men trying to scam their way into a women’s prison to victimize women. These are the same arguments we heard in the North Carolina restroom law.”
Women’s Declaration International has sought to pin down the number of transgender inmates in state prisons. As for how many male-born prisoners are housed in women’s facilities, Keep Prisons Single Sex says, “We don’t know and we are unlikely to ever know the exact numbers.”
Although transgender convicts are targets for harassment in men’s prisons, victims can also be victimizers.
In December, Keep Prisons Single Sex released data from a Federal Bureau of Prisons public records request showing that 48.47% of male-to-female transgender prisoners in the federal system had been convicted of sex crimes, versus 11.2% of the general male population.
The group also found that 916 biological male federal prisoners identified as transgender. If they were all assigned to the women’s system, the women’s federal prison population would be 7.7% male-born.
Woman II Woman founder Amie Ichikawa, who was incarcerated from 2009-2013 at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, said female convicts are sympathetic to the plight of abused transgender prisoners. Still, she said, such transfers represent “the minority within the minority.”
“The community of incarcerated women were told that the transfers coming in from the men’s prison were scared, timid trans women that had been horribly abused and were in great danger,” said Ms. Ichikawa, who keeps in touch with dozens of female inmates. “They were completely unaware that this also included nonbinary prisoners and fully functioning heterosexual men.”
Although the dangers in men’s prisons are well-documented, female prisoners shouldn’t be forced to serve as “human shields,” said feminist writer Jennifer Gingrich.
“The fact that a male may be targeted by other violent men does not somehow mean that it’s safe to house him with female inmates,” said Women’s Liberation Front advisory council member Jennifer Chavez. “The problem of male violence in men’s prisons needs to be solved there. Women’s prisons are not therapeutic services for males.”
Court cases seeking housing transfers for transgender convicts, including a case with Illinois inmate Janiah Monroe’s name on it, are moving on a parallel track with the legislative campaign.
In December 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union won a federal injunction on behalf of Monroe and five other inmates aimed at improving conditions for transgender prisoners and ending decisions on housing “based on genitalia and/or physical size or appearance.”
During testimony, Illinois Department of Corrections psychiatrist William Puga said transgender prisoners such as Monroe “sometimes scare the other women.”
“Dr. Puga received information that Monroe threatened staff and other inmates,” said the order. “Women at the facility filed complaints against Monroe under the Prison Rape Elimination Act; some were false but many were legitimate. The female facility eventually placed Monroe in segregation for her own safety.”
Monroe attorney Alan Mills, executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, said “Ms. Monroe and I believe that the allegations are false.”
“No criminal charges have been filed against Ms. Monroe, nor has IDOC commenced any disciplinary action against her,” Mr. Mills said in a statement. “Additionally, the plaintiff’s attorney has withdrawn from the case brought against IDOC regarding the rape allegation.”
Monroe, 32, who is 6 feet, 1 inch tall and weighs 195 pounds, has a lengthy rap sheet that includes second-degree murder and aggravated battery. The inmate is still housed at Logan, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections.
