Current and former female inmates sounded the alarm over gender-inclusive prison housing policies in recent letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee after Ted Cruz interrogated a Biden judicial nominee who transferred a transgender-identifying male child rapist to a women’s prison.
In May, Cruz grilled district court judge Sarah Netburn, who approved the transfer of a six-foot transgender-identifying male child rapist to a women’s prison. The Biden administration nominated Netburn to join the bench in the Southern District of New York. In August 2022, Netburn allowed male sex offender July Justine Shelby to be sent to FMC Carswell, a female federal correctional facility in Fort Worth, Texas. The judge’s order overturned the federal Bureau of Prisons’ rejection of his request for female housing.
“As a former inmate in the California state prison system, I share your concern about how women’s rights are being pushed aside compared to the interests of men who are self-identifying as women and gaining entry to facilities meant for women,” former female inmate Amie Ichikawa wrote to the committee in a letter sent by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and obtained by National Review.
“Most incarcerated women have already experienced sexual trauma and violence during our lives,” she added. “We are trying to heal and prepare to be productive citizens after serving out our sentences. Having men in our prison systems disrupts all of this. We fear for our safety.”
At Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), where Ichikawa served five years, she was incarcerated with convicted men who identified as women, according to an IWF mini-documentary. After California’s Senate Bill 132, known as the Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act, went into effect in 2021, male felons were able to relocate to the women’s facility if they declared themselves to be women.
“We have further loss of privacy as we are forced to share intimate spaces with a man,” current female inmate at CCWF Alissa Kamholz wrote in her letter. “We watch as some prisons are victims of abuse and others willingly engage in sexual acts in our shared space. This isn’t right. This isn’t fair.”
In 2023, Kamholz was forced to share a room in the prison with a man she believed to be tied to her childhood abusers, members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Her new cellmate had familiar features, such as long hair, that reminded her of those who had victimized her and amplified her already-recurring nightmares and PTSD. She lived in a constant state of panic.
A former female inmate at CCWF named Evelyn Valiente, a pseudonym she used with IWF for her mini documentary out of fear of blackmail and retaliation, also sent a letter to the committee decrying the gender-inclusive prison housing. Valiente served two decades in CCWF for murder.
Valiente told IWF that a transgender-identifying male inmate in a cell close to her own entered into a relationship with a female inmate, and the two could regularly be heard yelling, fighting, and kicking doors. The male inmate attempted to attack Valiente’s own roommate, she said.
“That was scary,” she told IWF. “A lot of us as women, we come from very abusive backgrounds, so it’s a lot of walking [in] that trauma.”
Many of the trans-identifying male inmates at women’s prisons that National Review has uncovered have criminal records that include sexual violence and predation.
Born William McClain, Shelby, the man that Judge Netburn approved to go to a women’s facility, pleaded guilty in 1994 to child molestation of a nine-year-old boy and to rape of a seventeen-year-old girl. After his release 18 years later, Shelby violated parole by using the internet in his apartment, landing himself in prison for another six years until 2015. After being released again, Shelby underwent hormone therapy to begin transitioning to a female.