In 2021, if you are a pessimist and a cynic, you will invariably be proven right. I mention this because in April I wrote that California’s new law placing so-called “transgender women” in women’s prisons put women at risk. Abigail Shrier, who has written about transgender pressure on girls, reports that women in California’s prisons who have had to share space with so-called “transgender” women have indeed felt at risk. This matters to everyone because, if the Democrats do away with the filibuster, they will pass the Equality Act which, in turn, will place all women in America at risk, whether in prisons, in locker rooms, and in restrooms.

Preliminarily, something needs to be done about those men whose gender dysphoria genuinely seems them believing they are women. Placing these men in a men’s prison is so cruel it violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment,” for these men’s fellow inmates subject them to horrific sexual assaults. However, placing men who claim to be “transgender” in the women’s prison population is not a solution.

Abigail Shrier, who has come under withering fire for writing that there’s enormous societal pressure on American girls to declare themselves “transgender,” has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) explaining that the influx of men into California’s women’s prisons is genuinely dangerous for the women inmates. To put a human face on the problem, Shrier spoke with five current and former inmates in California’s women’s prison system.

Shrier explains that, in California, men who claim to be women must be treated as women – which means they get housed in the women’s rooms, regardless of their surgical or hormonal status. While the women Shrier spoke with were sympathetic to the plight of so-called “transgender” in men’s prisons and were amenable to sharing prison space with men who had been surgically emasculated, the problem arises with those men who come equipped with male parts and hormones – and male height and strength. Additionally, Shrier explains that, even if these men genuinely believe that they are women, the majority of them are not innately homosexual. Instead, they’re still heterosexual, although they class themselves as “lesbians.”

In California’s Chowchilla, women prisoners are all mixed together, regardless of the severity of their crime. Additionally, rather than two prisoners to a cell, eight women will share a room. There’ll be a sink and toilet inside the cell, separated from the room by a cowboy (or saloon) door.

Tyrina Griffin, a woman who spent 20 years in the women’s prison at Chowchilla, described the problem:

“They’re getting a full erection,” she said. “So you’re locked in this room, 24/7, with a man and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you tell the police you don’t want to live with a man, or you’re afraid or whatever, you’ll get a disciplinary infraction. So you’re basically punished for being scared.”

[snip]

She added that women inside the prison are looking for ways to arm themselves. “They made it into a more of a war zone, to me, because I know women who are like, ‘I refuse to live with a man, and if I have to make me a prison knife to defend myself, then I’m going to do that.’ . . . I mean, you know how strong men are. Imagine one woman trying to defend herself against this big ol’ man, and the men coming in, they are like 6-foot-5, 6-foot-6, 300 pounds. These men look like Hercules compared to these little women. Can you fault the woman for actually trying to defend herself?”

The women aren’t the only ones who are scared. The female guards in Chowchilla are afraid, too, because men are more violent – and, unlike the guards in men’s prisons, the guards at Chowchilla have only batons and pepper spray. They also may be called upon to cavity search a “transgender” woman because prisoners are entitled to ask for a woman to conduct such a search.

If California, which has a supermajority of Democrats in its Assembly, wants to go down this path, it can. It’s one state out of many, which means that those who don’t want to live the California way can, at least in theory, leave. (Sadly, family commitments or economics leave many conservatives trapped in the state.) However, if the Democrats kill the filibuster and pass the Equality Act, there is no escaping. The California experiment will become the law of the land and everyone’s wives, daughters, and mothers will be at risk.

America’s prisons must protect vulnerable men who think they’re women – but they need to figure out a better way to do it than to put actual women at risk.

IMAGE: Mug shot of Andre Patterson.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.