Dueling court orders regarding men who claim to be women serving time in federal prison have resulted the Department of Justice creating a sex-segregated wing in a women’s prison to house the men.
The Justice Department, through the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is seeking to transfer every male inmate claiming to be female in the country to one female-only prison — Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas — after one federal judge blocked an executive order to remove “trans”-identifying men from female prisons, and another federal judge ordered those men to be segregated from the women.
During the Biden administration, an inmate claiming to be “transgender” could be placed in a facility meant for the opposite sex. In a prison system that has in most situations been sex-segregated, men were now being allowed to serve their time in female prisons, simply by claiming to be female.
President Donald Trump attempted to stop that practice through an executive order, but shortly after, males being housed in female prisons sued to block its enforcement. D.C. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, in Jane Doe v. Blanche (or, Doe v. McHenry), agreed, stopping the transfer of 14 male inmates to male prisons.
“[The injunction] does not, at this juncture, require that Plaintiffs be housed alongside cisgender female inmates or share common spaces,” Lamberth wrote.
At the same time, another federal lawsuit, Fleming v. Warden T. Rule, was filed by FMC Carswell inmate Rhonda Fleming, asking that the male inmates be removed from general population “for her protection,” as, “Under the Biden administration, numerous biological male inmates have been placed in the prison. Biological, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women are forced to shower and share other intimate facilities, in violation of their bodily privacy rights, with male inmates.”
According to the filing, there were over 20 male inmates at FMC Carswell alone at the time, adding, “Many of these male inmates are incarcerated for violent acts against women and children, to include rapists, child molesters, and domestic abusers. The prison officials allow these male inmates to intimidate women in lines for medications, meals, and in assigned cells.”
Texas Federal Judge Sidney Fitzwater, another Reagan appointee, ultimately signed a protective order, partitioning the men into a separate floor of the facility, not to interact with the women.
“It is being described as a ‘men’s prison within a women’s federal prison,” Fleming told The Federalist in an email correspondence. “Judge Lamberth believes the men have a right to be in a women`s prison, without any type of segregation from the general population of women inmates. Judge Fitzwater does not.”
Elspeth Cypher, former Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice and President of the Women’s Liberation Front, told The Federalist that the men in FMC Carswell were initially allowed to be in the cafeteria and recreation areas with the women, “but the men were angry with the women for complaining about them and so they threatened and harassed the women in those areas. As a result, their recreation time and cafeteria time had to be segregated also.”
While Fleming and a class of other female inmates were granted relief by being moved to other prisons, the intent of the BOP to move all male inmates in the federal prison system to FMC Carswell causes the same problem for the rest of the female inmates in that facility.
However, transferring all the male inmates to a single facility while these court battles continue seems to be a creative, temporary solution to the ultimate problem the Justice Department is trying to solve, which is segregating inmates by sex as they should be.
But the male inmates appear to want full integration with the women, as they filed through their attorneys at National Center for LGBTQ Rights and the GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders an emergency motion asking essentially to ignore the ruling in Fleming and “enforce” Jane Doe.
“The Plaintiffs already housed in the segregated unit are suffering severe and escalating harm, including resurgent gender dysphoria, loss of clinical progress achieved over years in general population, deteriorating mental health, and, for at least one Plaintiff, the resurgence of suicidal ideation,” the motion states. “Absent immediate intervention by the Court, Plaintiffs will continue to suffer harm that cannot be remedied through an award of money damages.”
Specifically, the male inmates asking the court to move them to general population with women and never create segregated units again.
“The trans-identifying men in the separate unit in Carswell are now claiming that their gender dysphoria is increasing because they are separate from the ‘other’ women,” Cypher said. “The problem the trans-identifying men have always complained about is that they are abused by male prisoners. Now, they are complaining about not being with the women. As Amie Ichikawa, founder of WomanIIWoman, a nonprofit that helps women re-enter society said ‘Women are not support animals.'”
As The Federalist reported, FMC Carswell, along with its male counterpart facility FMC Fort Worth, were turned into “transgender” surgical centers during the Biden administration, and there are other court orders involving Lamberth that maintain these inmates’ abilities to keep receiving hormone replacement drugs.
