I was talking with this bloke about men-who-say-they’re-women (hereinafter MWSTWs) being housed in women’s prisons and he said to me: ‘It may well be that women prisoners don’t normally see it as a big problem and can deal with it just as other bullies, or male guards. They turn their backs on them or bash them.’
That started me off on a search for instances where women prisoners did see it as a big enough problem to protest or object about it.
Introduction:
• My emphasis has been on what prisoners have done (and in some cases former prisoners), as distinct from what advocates for women’s sex-based rights have done, admirable endeavours though these be, e.g. Keep Prisons Single Sex
• And also distinct from what former prison staff members (nurses, educators, guards etc) have done, although the testimonies of such persons are undoubtedly valuable in shedding light on the negative impact of allowing MWSTWs into women’s prisons – and arguably more effective than prisoners’ testimonies, given the widespread prejudicial tendency to view prisoners’ claims – about anything at all – as self-serving and mendacious. Testimonies of former prison staffers can be found here: “Cruel & Unusual Punishment: The Male Takeover of Female Prisons“.
• What I itemise here are mainly the forms of the protests, the locations, and the dates; not the detail of the women’s claims or what they called/are calling for.
• And I also note at this point the distinct possibility that women prisoners’ discontent with the presence of MWSTWs is far more widespread than is manifest in the form of protests of any kind. Jeanette Driever, for example, who was incarcerated at FMC Carswell, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, claims that 90 percent of the women there felt uncomfortable about the presence of MWSTWs, but only a tiny percentage would say anything or complain about it because of retaliation.
In a similar vein, the Canadian advocacy group CAWSBAR claims (2025):
“Female Inmates are reluctant to speak out or complain about the harms caused by Trans-identifying Male Inmates. Complaints are often viewed by correctional officers and staff as harassment, intolerance, and/or “transphobia”. Female Inmates do not speak out for fear of an entry on their institutional record which will eventually be considered by the Parole Board of Canada, and which could impact the decision to grant or not grant parole.”
Likewise, former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss wrote (2020) of the situation in Scotland:
“The fact that women have no effective avenue for query or complaint at what they might, not unreasonably, see as men being held with them, is disabling. The fear of being regarded or reported as, ‘transphobic’, or of being accused of committing a ‘transphobic hate crime’, is very real even though few of what trans rights organisations call ‘hate crime’, misgendering being one example, are actually crimes.”
Some instances of retaliation/punishment for women prisoner protesters are detailed in this paper.
Protest
I’ve divided protests up into four different kinds:
• direct action
• ‘speaking out’ ie providing testimonies
• lobbying
• lawsuits
Direct Action
I start off with direct action. Women prisoners who simply do not comply with the TWAW mantra (TransWomenAreWomen). Who refuse to go along with the deceit and delusion.
• Women prisoners at the Mary Wade Women’s Correctional Centre, Sydney, Australia, got into fights with axe-attacker ‘Evie’ Amati. One such fight, at least, was occasioned by a woman telling Amati he should be in a male prison. 2019.
• Women prisoners at the Deer Park aka Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, Melbourne, Australia, ‘misgendered’ rapist ‘Lisa Jones’, ie referred to him as a man, which he is. They were punished for doing so with solitary confinement.
Personal communication from the partner of one such prisoner.
• Women prisoners at Central California Women’s Facility, Chowcilla, California, USA, organised a roster to sleep in shifts in order to keep watch on ‘Dana Rivers’, who murdered a lesbian couple and their teenage son (and before that harassed the women’s music festival MichFest for being a women-only event).
Personal communication.
• Women prisoners in Canada avoid prison-provided group-based psychological programs designed to heal childhood sexual trauma if MWSTWs with convictions for sexual offences or violent offences involving women and children are taking part in them (2025). This is a form of direct-action protest (boycott) but of course it undermines the women’s opportunity to rehabilitate as well.
• Prisoner Jeanette Driever, a survivor of rape, took night shifts in her prison job as a medical assistant at the FMC Carswell, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, to help her avoid the five MWSTWs incarcerated there (2017 or so). She also testifies (2025): ‘There were just a lot of things that I did to protect myself, and one of those was never to be alone with them, or never to be in the same area as them. I would be aware of my surroundings at all times.’ Such avoidance actions I would classify as being halfway between direct-action protest and coping strategy. At the very least, they demonstrate that this prisoner felt she had to go beyond her usual social skills to manage the situations the presence of MWSTWs produced for her. I note that prolonged hyper vigilance can have a serious impact on a person’s behaviour, health, and quality of life. In that sense, avoidance protest/coping can, like the boycotting of supposedly therapeutic programs (see above), have negative effects on a prisoner’s prospects for rehabilitation.
‘Speaking Out’: Oral and Written Testimonies
The effectiveness of this form of protest depends upon collaboration between women prisoners and outside advocates, a collaboration often facilitated by former prisoners e.g. Rebeca Warmbo (Minnesota, USA) and Heather Mason (Canada).
• 20 women incarcerated in Canada provided written testimonies of their experiences with MWSTWs in women’s prisons (2021-2022?) which are published on the website Gender Dissent. The testimonies were smuggled out of the prison/s by women’s advocates and no names of prisoners or prisons appear in the publication.
• Four women imprisoned at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, New Jersey, USA, provided written testimonies of their experiences with MWSTWs which were read out at the State Capitol in Trenton by activists from Justice Speaks: Free Speech for Women (2023).
• 11 women prisoners provided written testimonies of their experiences with MWSTWs which are published on the website Keep Prisons Single Sex (six prisoners in Canada, three in California, one in a federal prison in Florida, and one in England).
• Seven women imprisoned in California provided written testimonies of their experiences with MWSTWs (2021) which are published on the website Women’s Liberation Front.
• A woman prisoner in California, Michelle, provided a 5-minute oral testimony (2021) about MWSTWs via telephone which was recorded and is published on the website Women’s Liberation Front.
• Six women prisoners and three former prisoners provided oral testimonies (2024) about their experiences with MWSTWs via telephone which were recorded and published on the website of the Independent Women’s Forum as part of a series entitled Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Eight of the nine are or were incarcerated in California, and the ninth in Washington State.
• Five current prisoners at the Minnesota Correctional Facility, Shakopee, Minnesota, USA, provided oral testimonies of their experiences with MWSTWs which are quoted in articles on the website Reduxx (2024). All five use pseudonyms.
• One current prisoner at the Minnesota Correctional Facility, Shakopee, Minnesota, USA, provided an anonymous letter (2024) testifying to her experiences with MWSTWs which is posted on the website Reduxx.
• Three prisoners, apart from the plaintiff, provided affidavits (2023) for Rhonda Fleming’s Tallahassee lawsuit.
Lobbying
• Prisoners at Deer Park aka Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, Melbourne, Australia, sent a petition (2022) to the Victorian Minister for Corrections, Corrections Victoria, and the Ombudsman, asking for the removal of a MWSTW (‘Lisa Jones’), saying they were ‘concerned for their safety as the inmate has a “working” penis and a history of violent sexual assault’. They said ‘they were initially told the inmate would be “locked down 23 hours a day”, but that ultimately administration aimed for “a full living, working and socialisation integration”. (The petition did not succeed: the MWSTW remained at Deer Park and further MWSTWs were sent there.)
• Former prisoner Heather Mason submitted (2021) a brief to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security of the Canadian Parliament on the current situation in Canadian federal prisons in relation to reports of sexual coercion and violence. This action falls slightly outside the parameters of my purpose with this paper, in that it was not the action of a current prisoner; however it was, so Mason stated, informed by ‘a number of women who have reported to me the experiences they had in prison or the events they witnessed.’
• 22 former prisoners (20 of whom gave their names, the other 2 were anonymous) signed an open letter to the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS), 2021, accusing CAEFS of having ‘repeatedly silenced criminalized women’s reports, questions and input when they challenge CAEFS’ transgender position – a position that was decided on by a large majority of women without experiences of criminalization’; and urging CAEFS to join a call for an investigation into the issue of WSTWs in women’s prisons. CAEFS describes itself as ‘the leading national organization supporting criminalized women since 1978’ and receives funding from two government departments (Public Safety Canada and Women and Gender Equity Canada).
As with the Mason submission, the open letter was not an action by current prisoners, but I have included it partly as being an unique case of a protest action directed at a mainstream prisoner advocacy organisation (rather than a government agency or a court of law) and partly because of the claimed closeness of the signatories to current prisoners.
Lawsuits
• Three plaintiffs, all incarcerated at the time at the FMC Carswell, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, filed a motion in December 2016 seeking to have FMC Carswell included in a temporary injunction, issued earlier by a district judge, that blocked the Obama administration (then in its final days) from enforcing a directive which allowed public school students to choose a bathroom based on ‘gender identity’. One of the plaintiffs was Jeanette Driever, mentioned above. Another was Rhonda Fleming, see below. As a result of this action, Driever and Fleming say they were threatened and verbally abused by trans-identifying inmates, who told them ‘they were going to beat us up, they were going to target our families.’ Driever says that after this, she barely left her cell.
• In February 2017, the same three plaintiffs filed a suit against the Bureau of Prisons policy that allowed MWSTWs to be placed in female prisons, naming Obama, the Democratic National Committee and several former Obama Cabinet members as respondents. The case was dismissed.
• Prisoner Rhonda Fleming (see above) brought a suit against Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee, Florida, USA, and all other Federal women’s prisons, arguing violation of her constitutional right to bodily privacy (Amendment Four). The case went to trial in Tallahassee in January 2025 – the first such case to do so – but was lost.
• Prisoner Jeanette Driever launched a lawsuit against the US government (2021-2022) for reasons similar to Rhonda Fleming’s, but it was dismissed because Driever didn’t file ‘her brief and appendix’ by the due date.
• Four complainants originally, now six (since July 2024), all women prisoners, are bringing a case against Jeffrey Macomber, secretary of the California Dept of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). The case was originally filed as Chandler v CDCR, and is now Chandler v Macomber (since July 2024). The case seeks the overturn of California SB 132, which, as described by the CDCR website, ‘allows incarcerated transgender, non-binary and intersex people to request to be housed and searched in a manner consistent with their gender identity’. The suit claims the law violates the First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. The case began in 2021, and is ongoing as at May 2025. A feature of the case is the persistent opposition to it by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU petitioned the court to be added as party to the case representing MWSTWs; and is now seeking to have the case dismissed.
One of the complainants, Tomiekia Johnson, was deprived of her job as an educator at the prison, and placed in solitary confinement for eight hours, after she filed a report about the MWSTW ‘Dana Rivers’ (see above). In addition, prison authorities placed ‘Rivers’ (2023) in Johnson’s housing unit, a move which Johnson considers ‘beyond negligent’, given that she (Johnson) had specifically requested he not be housed in her unit because she is known to be vocal ‘about being housed with predators’.
Another of the complainants, Cathleen Quinn, has also been punished for reporting sexual harassment by a MWSTW in 2022:
On two separate occasions in February 2022, Cathleen discovered [a MWSTW] was peeping at her while she was using the bathroom and naked from the waist down. This behavior was caught on video, and Cathleen filed reports to the prison.
CCWF [Central California Women’s Facility] did not take action against [the MWSTW] for this sexual harassment but instead retaliated against Cathleen and other witnesses, [one of whom was Tomiekia Johnson (see above)]. She and both witnesses were put in solitary confinement “for their safety” despite this being against prison policy.
Most disturbingly, though, CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] stripped Cathleen of her long-awaited freedom in retaliation for reporting the harassment she experienced. Shortly after she was found suitable for parole, CCWF issued a retaliatory Rules Violation Report (“RVR”) against Cathleen for reporting the harassment, alleging that she had done so due to “bias” against this man, leading to her parole grant being vacated. At the time of the revocation, she was roughly four months away from freedom.
The next year, Cathleen appealed the RVR and, after 11 months, was exonerated and found not guilty. Stripped of its reason to keep Cathleen in prison, CCWF’s parole board created new pretextual reasons to continue to block her parole eligibility for an additional five years, this time by arbitrarily finding her guilty of an ambiguous violation of “institutional misconduct.” CCWF did not even hide its bias against Cathleen. The Commissioner overseeing Cathleen’s parole hearing told her she “should have been quiet” about her victimization so she could have “gone home.”
• FDJ, a former prisoner, sought judicial review (2019-2021) in the UK of the Secretary of State for Justice’s policies regarding ‘the care and management within the prison estate of persons who identify as the opposite gender from that which was assigned to them at birth.’ In particular, she challenged ‘the policy in relation to the allocation to a women’s prison of transgender women who have been convicted of sexual or violent offences against women.’ FDJ lost the case.
Conclusion
Women prisoners do not in general feel comfortable with MWSTWs in women’s prisons. Nor do they feel they can deal with the presence of MWSTWs with confidence and ease. There are a growing number of expressions of disquiet, objection, and rebellion. Mainstream prisoner advocacy organisations (eg CAEFS) and orthodox human rights organisations (eg the American Civil Liberties Union) have been unresponsive to this upsurge due to their allegiance to gender-identity ideology. New networks involving prisoners, former prisoners, and women’s sex-based rights advocates are developing in the vacuum thus created.
by Eilean Haley