Trump’s prison order draws a line that reality should have drawn first

When the news broke that President Trump followed through on his promise to bar taxpayer-funded gender surgeries in federal prisons, the coverage quickly pivoted to one question: How will this affect transgender-identifying inmates?

As a former inmate — I served five years at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla — I kept thinking about the people the headlines keep skipping: the women forced to endure confinement while male inmates encroach on their privacy.

Women in prison deserve the dignity to heal without being sacrificed to an ideology.

After I did my time, I re-entered civil society and founded a nonprofit to help women build sustainable lives after prison. Not long after I got out, women still inside California’s prison system began calling me with alarming reports: Administrators were moving men into women’s prisons.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. No sane person should view placing males in a women’s prison as a “compassionate” policy. It only makes sense if you ignore what prison actually is — or if you want to impose a sinister ideology no matter who gets hurt.

Some of these males claim a female identity because women’s prisons tend to be less violent than men’s prisons. In some cases, they don’t even claim to be women. They claim to be “nonbinary” and gain admission anyway. These men do not always come with minor offenses or nonviolent histories. Some are rapists. Some are child molesters. Some committed brutal, unthinkable crimes.

For years, Bureau of Prisons policies on transgender health care moved forward with little acknowledgment of the harm they impose on incarcerated women. Women like me watched administrators apply sweeping ideological rules to an environment where the stakes involve physical safety, privacy, and survival.

Under the approach that dominated the last several years, officials treated the feelings and demands of men as more important than the safety and dignity of the women forced to live beside them.

Prison has never been, and never will be, a place for “one-size-fits-all” social experiments. Every decision inside a facility affects real human beings in extremely close quarters. Housing assignments, medical decisions, and institutional accommodations cannot follow slogans or pressure campaigns from outside groups. They must prioritize the safety and well-being of the people who live there.

Anyone who has lived inside prison understands how this plays out on the ground. Women cannot leave their cells without permission. They cannot lock their own doors. They cannot choose their cellmates. They shower under supervision, change clothes in shared spaces, and sleep just feet away from strangers. Many entered prison after surviving domestic violence, sexual assault, or trafficking.

Where is the compassion for those women — women trying to rehabilitate while they relive their trauma?

The system has told them, again and again, that their trauma doesn’t matter, their fear doesn’t matter, and their right to privacy doesn’t matter. Instead, officials tell them to prioritize the identity claims of men. Give an inch and the activists will take a mile — especially when you put men with histories of violence against women and children into living arrangements that involve showers, sleeping quarters, and constant proximity.

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Blaze News Illustration

President Trump’s executive order barring taxpayer-funded gender surgeries in federal prisons signals a shift away from treating prisons like laboratories for social experimentation. The order supports women and supports safety.

For incarcerated women, it means they no longer have to watch men receive treatments and accommodations designed to make them “feel like a woman,” while the women themselves lose basic standards of privacy and dignity the moment they enter custody.

Incarcerated people deserve humane treatment. That includes access to medical care, mental health care, and dignity.

But dignity cannot mean denying reality.

If you’ve lived behind the walls, you know what the outside world often forgets: These policies shape the daily lives of thousands of women. Their chance at rehabilitation suffers when officials force them to live in fear, relive trauma, and navigate needless threats of real violence. Women in prison deserve the dignity to heal without being sacrificed to an ideology.