On Saturday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law mandating that convicted criminals can request placement in single-sex prisons based upon the prisoners’ self-defined “gender identity.” There’s strong evidence that letting intact men go to women’s prisons is an invitation for rape. That makes the new law one of the most misogynistic things California’s hard-left government could have done.

For myriad reasons, only the smallest fraction of which has to do with biology, there have always been men and women who feel uncomfortable in their skin and associate more strongly with the opposite sex. That must be a terrible feeling, and these people deserve our pity and should be treated whenever possible with kindness and respect for their suffering.

Nevertheless, just because they feel as if they are the opposite sex does not mean that their delusion must be society’s reality. That hasn’t stopped California, which has joined Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York City, and Massachusetts by passing a law allowing convicted prisoners to pick their “gender identity” when they’re being assigned to the single-sex prisons in California’s corrections system:

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law on Saturday requiring California to house transgender inmates in prisons based on their gender identity — but only if the state does not have “management or security concerns.”

[snip]

The law Newsom signed Saturday says officers must ask inmates privately during the intake process if they identify as transgender, nonbinary or intersex. Those inmates can then request to be placed in a facility that houses either men or women.

The law says the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation cannot deny those requests solely because of inmates' anatomy, sexual orientation or “a factor present” among other inmates at the facility.

The justification for this new law is that men who identify as women, when placed in all-male prisoners are often raped. In Australia, for example, a man who identified as a woman claims to have been raped over 2,000 times, which is utterly appalling and, I’m sure, not unique. Vulnerable men need to be protected -- but a sane society doesn’t protect gender-confused men by putting women at risk.

California’s new law doesn’t require that the men have had mutilating surgery or take hormones because of their body dysmorphia. Instead, the law lets the men decide what gender they are. If I were a man with a choice of a dangerous men’s prison or a more civil women’s prison, and I wasn’t all about being macho, it might seem like a good thing to announce that I’d found my inner woman.

For the women, it’s anything but a good thing.

In England, which has been housing men in women’s prisons for some time now, the program has been disastrous for women:

The United Kingdom Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has revealed that inmates who identify as transgender are responsible for a rate of sexual attacks that is exponentially higher than their proportion of the population of women’s jails and prisons.

In response to a question that former Labour Party General Secretary Baroness McDonagh put before Parliament, the MoJ has acknowledged that, while inmates who identify as transgender make up about one percent of the 3,600 inmates in women’s jails and prisons, they have committed 5.6% of all reported sexual assaults.

Also in England, a man calling himself Karen White ended up in prison after stabbing a neighbor. Despite a history that included sexual assault, exposure, sexually abusing minors, and cruelty to animals, he ended up in a women’s prison, where he promptly sexually assaulted women.

In Illinois, a woman filed a federal lawsuit claiming that a man who identified as a “transgender woman” raped her.

In a moral nation, the prisons must protect those men who compulsively present as women. However, that same societal morality says that women in prison must be protected from being forced to share their quarters with mentally ill, or merely opportunistic, men who still have their external genitalia attached.

Image: A poster about Karen White, from Fair Play For Women.