Of the more 300 male inmates within the California prison system who identify as women and have requested to transfer to women’s facilities, only one-in-ten applications have been approved.
The California prison system currently incarcerates 1,115 men who claim to identify as women and about one third of that number have requested a transfer to female facilities, according to statistics provided by the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) to the Daily Signal in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Transgender inmates aren’t required to receive gender-reassignment surgery to be housed in a facility with the opposite sex, according to the DOC website.
“All requests for housing based on gender identity will be reviewed by a multi-disciplinary classification committee chaired by a Warden and made up of custody, medical and mental health care staff, and a PREA Compliance Manager. This committee will review all case factors and the individual’s history to make a recommendation for approval or disapproval of the request,” the website reads.
Gender-based housing requests, according to the DOC, are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The screening involves a review of the individual’s background, including their history prior to and during incarceration; their crime, arrest and criminal history; prior incidents of victimization either in custody or in the community; and convictions for sex offense.
Prison Rape Elimination Act standards, which classifies all sexual engagement within the prison as non-consensual, require that transfer applicants be designated as: at risk as a victim, at risk as an abuser, or not identified as being at risk. The DOC claims that an at-risk victim would not, therefore, be housed in a cell with an at-risk abuser.
National Review previously reported that within the Washington State prison apparatus, some of the transgender transfers to the Washington Corrections Center for Women, formerly the only exclusively female jail in the state, are convicted felons with violent criminal records. A former prison guard and former inmate at the facility alleged that some of these male offenders have repeatedly sexually abused and exploited vulnerable women residents.
Despite the California DOC’s assurances that safety concerns of the incarcerated women within the system will be taken into account in transgender housing placements, the Women’s Liberation Front, the radical feminist organization that has demanded the exclusion of men from women’s spaces, rejected them.
Lauren Adams, the legal director for the group, told the Daily Signal: “If it is a good review process, I would hate to see a bad process. Beyond our general objections to housing women with biological men, we are hearing reports of incidents of sexual acts, both consensual and nonconsensual.”
In November, WLF sued the California Department of Corrections on behalf of plaintiff Krystal Gonzalez, a female inmate at the Central California Women’s Facility who said she was raped by a man who said he identified as a woman.
The lawsuit noted that “the psychological distress caused by her assault is exacerbated by the prison’s refusal to acknowledge the sex of her perpetrator.”