A vehicle enters the Central California Women’s Facility, in Chowchilla (Madera County). The Trump administration is investigating California for housing transgender women at women’s prisons. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
The Trump administration is escalating its attack on California for recognizing transgender people, accusing the state of exposing women in prison to violent assaults by allowing trans women to transfer to women’s prison facilities.
The federal government will investigate “California’s and Maine’s practice of housing men in women’s prisons,” President Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced Thursday, referring — as it generally does — to transgender women as “men.”
“There have been allegations of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males in the women’s prison,” the department said, referring to the California Institution for Women in Chino (San Bernardino County) and the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla (Madera County).
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The Madera County district attorney charged one former prisoner who identifies as a transgender woman, Tremaine Carroll, with raping two other prisoners in 2024 after Carroll was transferred to the women’s prison. Carroll was sent back to a men’s prison and has denied the charges; the case is ongoing.
Yet despite a 2021 state law allowing transgender inmates to request a transfer to a prison consistent with their gender identity, very few of those requests have been approved. As of last May, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs the prisons, had denied more than 47 times as many applications as it had approved, said Erik Mebust, spokesperson for state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, author of the state law and former chair of the Legislature’s LGBTQ Caucus.
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“The main driver of sexual abuse in prison” is “assault by prison staff,” Mebust told the Chronicle last year.
But the Justice Department quoted Bill Essayli, a former Republican state legislator and now an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who said that Wiener’s law — titled the Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act — “has provided none of these qualities to the female inmates of state prisons who have been forced to share space with biological men who are violent felons.”
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The Trump administration did not cite any evidence of actual assaults by transgender prisoners, but said it would look into “widely reported allegations” of abuse in the states.
In response, Terri Hardy, spokesperson for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the agency “is committed to providing a safe, humane, respectful and rehabilitative environment for all incarcerated people”and follows a 2003 federal law requiring prisons to protect inmates from sexual assaults.
She also said the Trump administration’s advocacy of keeping transgender women in men’s prisons “is a suggestion to violate federal law.” Courts are reviewing that issue after the Trump administration’s Bureau of Prisons ordered trans inmates to be housed in federal prisons based on their gender assigned at birth, an order blocked by two federal judges last year.
Courtney Hanson, spokesperson for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the Justice Department’s investigation was “part of a larger national attack being waged by the Trump administration to erase and harm transgender people, especially transgender women in prison.”
Trump has consistently denied the legitimacy of transgender people, declaring in an executive order on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” as determined permanently at birth. He has sought to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from California schools and colleges that have allowed transgender women and girls to compete in women’s sports.
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And a widely circulated advertisement in Trump’s 2024 election campaign showed his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that under her administration, “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to medical treatment, as required by federal law.
“Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you,” the ad concluded.
Sara Libby contributed to this article.