On March 26, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it will be investigating prisons in California and Maine to determine whether housing transgender women in women’s prisons violates the Constitution. According to the DOJ, there are concerns that prisons that house transgender women violate cisgender women’s constitutional rights, such as the First Amendment, Eighth Amendment, and Fourteenth Amendment. Both of California’s women’s prisons, California Institution for Women and Central California Women’s Facility, will be subject to investigations.
Pamela Bondi, who was recently fired from her role as U.S. Attorney General, insisted, “The Trump Administration will not stand by if governors are facilitating the abuse of biological women under the guise of inclusion.” The “abuse” Bondi and other proponents of this investigation are referencing is alleged “sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism, and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation” caused by incarcerated transgender women. Although the investigation directly references a sexual harassment case in Maine, there were no allusions to substantiated cases in California.
This investigation is merely disguised as protecting cisgender women. Not only does it center on exceedingly rare “abuses,” the investigation’s agenda overshadows the unique challenges incarcerated transgender people endure by further stigmatizing and dehumanizing the transgender community.
At this time, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is not acquiescing to the DOJ’s allegations. In a statement to Fox26 News, the CDCR asserted, “Any suggestion that all transgender women be assigned to men’s institutions as a matter of policy is a suggestion to violate federal law.” The CDCR’s statement also referenced the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), a federal law that enforces a zero-tolerance standard for sexual harassment and abuse in correctional facilities, including implementation of prevention, detection, and response procedures. Essentially, the CDCR suggests that forcing transgender women into men’s correctional facilities would lead to an increase in sexual harassment and abuse and violate the PREA.
While empirical data on the incarcerated transgender population is generally limited, there have been increasing efforts to capture transgender people’s experiences in correctional facilities. The Vera Institute of Justice and Black and Pink National surveyed 280 transgender people in state prisons across 31 states. They found that 53 percent of respondents reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual encounters while incarcerated. The general prison population’s statistics pale in comparison, with the 2023-24 National Inmate Survey finding that four percent of the adult incarcerated population reported experiencing sexual victimization.
Transgender women are even more susceptible to sexual violence while incarcerated. Supported by the CDCR and the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, a survey used data from 315 transgender women incarcerated across 27 California men’s prisons and found that 69.4 percent of incarcerated transgender women experienced sexual victimization.
Stepping outside of statistics, the experiences of incarcerated transgender women are even more horrifying. Alongside being deliberately misgendered, transgender women incarcerated in men’s prisons report being harassed and referred to by slurs and other derogatory terms such as “cum-buckets.” Furthermore, nearly 90 percent of respondents reported having experienced extended solitary confinement for reasons that ranged from harassment or targeting by staff members, staff claiming “safety reasons,” or incarcerated individuals requesting it themselves. These reasons for solitary confinement highlight the reality for incarcerated transgender people: the solitary confinement space, dedicated to enact intensive and torturous punishment, either darkens into a place for transgender discrimination or becomes the only safe zone within the correctional facility.
Another study interviewed several incarcerated transgender women in California, including a transgender woman named Jasmine. Upon arriving at a new prison, Jasmine recounted the sergeant pressuring her to find a boyfriend or else face solitary confinement. His reason? She would “get in less trouble” with a man. However, partnering with a man does not truly protect incarcerated transgender women, as revealed by Zoe, a survey respondent who still experienced sexual abuse from a correctional officer.
The DOJ is focused on protecting the constitutional rights and safety of incarcerated cisgender women, but they fail to consider, and likely intentionally so, the chilling injustices and civil rights violations that transgender women face in men’s correctional facilities. Given these realities, in what world does forcing transgender women into men’s facilities reconcile and justify the limited and alleged sexual abuses committed against incarcerated cisgender women?
California sets itself apart from the majority of states by generally protecting and respecting its incarcerated transgender population’s rights. For instance, California’s SB 132, or The Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act, went into effect in 2021, allowing transgender, non-binary, and intersex individuals to be housed and searched in accordance with their gender identity and preferences.
Unsurprisingly, there have been frequent attempts to threaten SB 132. In February 2025, California Assemblymember Alexandra Macedo introduced AB 1464, which would allow the CDCR to deny housing preferences to incarcerated transgender and gender non-conforming individuals with certain convictions. However, this bill was killed in the Public Safety Committee, demonstrating California’s unwillingness to reverse SB 132. In the same legislative session, there was an attempt to pass SB 311, which would require the CDCR to establish separate housing facilities for specifically transgender women to “protect the security needs of biological women.”
Regardless of whether or not they pass, these bills demonstrate that incarcerated transgender people, and especially transgender women, are treated with a unique hostility. Many of these policies catastrophize transgender women’s sexual deviance. This same rhetoric is littered throughout the DOJ’s press release, which refers to transgender women as “men,” “biological men,” and “violent felons.”
Unfortunately, this rhetoric is not new when referring to the transgender community, which frequently faces accusations of being inherently mentally ill or pedophilic. Furthermore, legislators across the United States have made extensive efforts to criminalize the transgender community and its allies. In 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill titled the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which would imprison health care providers who administer gender-affirming care to minors. More recently, Idaho’s governor signed HB 752, which would imprison people who “knowingly and willfully” enter bathrooms that do not align with their assigned gender at birth.
Transgender people already face heightened criminalization rates. For instance, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found in 2012 that 16 percent of transgender and gender non-conforming respondents had been incarcerated at some point. The rates were higher for transgender women at 21 percent and even higher for Black and Native American respondents at 47 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Yet, the nation’s legislators seek to strip away not only transgender people’s dignity, but also their civil liberties.
The push to eliminate housing accommodations for incarcerated transgender women is not about preserving cisgender women’s safety, and never has been. For one, the DOJ’s investigation seeks to punish institutions that uphold the transgender community’s dignity. Moreover, the investigation attempts to demoralize and demonize transgender people by framing them as sexual deviants based on misconstrued and hyperbolized instances. Even worse, this investigation is only a small fragment of a larger movement to institutionalize transphobia. So that the public can understand the severity of the transgender community’s circumstances, I request that these legislators and the DOJ stop feigning civility by claiming public safety when their true intention is to utterly degrade and declass transgender people.
Featured Image Source: WikiMedia Commons
