(LifeSiteNews) — On January 14, Minnesota State Representative Mary Franson introduced Bill 435, which would prohibit the incarceration of trans-identifying males in female facilities. In 2023, the Minnesota Department of Corrections implemented a policy titled “Management and Placement of Incarcerated People Who Are Transgender, Gender Diverse, Intersex, or Nonbinary,” which permits trans-identifying males to request transfers to female facilities.
Franson’s bill, which would once have been a matter of common sense, has faced opposition and has not been enacted. Minnesota remains one of eleven states with similar policies.
Governor Tim Walz—yeah, that one—should be made to respond to a May 18 story by Alpha News, featuring an interview with Jamie Ali, a female prisoner at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee, a women’s prison. Ali said that she has been traumatized due the fact that she is locked up with male criminals. “I am a survivor of sexual assault. I’ve been raped three times,” Ali said. “I also experienced domestic violence growing up and in my previous relationships so the whole thing being here with these men has been a nightmare.”
According to Ali, the transgender policy she and the other women are forced to live under is causing severe and lasting psychological damage, and the panic attacks triggered by the male inmates keep her isolated. “I withdrew from every single one of my classes because there are transgenders in them and it’s very traumatic. I’ve been having panic attacks since I’ve got here.” The experience, she said, is “the worst time I’ve ever had to live through.”
“There’s been many nights that I don’t go to meals. I stay in my room.”
One inmate, Sean Windingland, was “charged with molesting his six-year-old twin daughters,” but somehow managed to get himself transferred to a women’s prison. “I mean, somebody make it make sense,” Ali said. “Upon them searching his room they found bottles filled with semen,” Ali claimed. “He was storing it to, I guess, get IPs (Imprisoned Persons) pregnant … or to give to them so they could then therefore try to impregnate their self.” A spokesman for Minnesota Department of Corrections said the story was “unsubstantiated.”
Another inmate, Bradley Sirvio, is serving a sentence for murder—but since changing his name to Aurora, is now “faced in a living unit across from me, so I see him a lot,” Ali said. Ali stated that Sirvio also engaged in “graphic sexual exchanged with female inmates.” According to an earlier Alpha News report, Sirvio “was among the first biological males transferred to Shakopee following the 2023 settlement of a lawsuit filed by former inmate Christina Lusk.”
Minnesota’s transgender policy has left vulnerable women profoundly unsafe. Male criminals can now achieve transfers simply by claiming to be a woman. “I can just say that and come here and do anything I want to,” Ali said. “So how do I not know that one of these men that claims to identify as a female don’t just say [that] to get here and then I become raped? That’s my biggest fear. As soon as I get on the other side of the fence—whether released through the charge being dropped or work release—I’m going to throw up, literally throw up, and then start sobbing and then find an attorney to represent me.”
As J.K. Rowling noted on X: “If what this women describes doesn’t constitute cruel and inhuman punishment, I don’t know what does.” She’s right. Tim Walz and his fellow trans activist Democrats claim that their transgender policies are compassionate—only because they consider women like Ali to be acceptable collateral damage. That is not compassion, that is cruelty. Mary Franson’s bill should be passed and implemented immediately.
