OKLAHOMA CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt held a ceremony on Monday to highlight some of what he considers the best laws he signed in the latest legislative session, including one to ensure male criminals are not housed with female inmates.
Officially signed into law May 13, SB 418 directs the state Department of Corrections to designate a specific sex for intimate facilities such as restrooms, changing areas, and sleeping quarters, and forbids members of one sex from being housed in multi-occupancy areas of a facility meant for the other. The law codifies and reinforces an executive order the governor signed on the subject in 2023.
“We were going to make sure we were protecting women’s spaces in Oklahoma,” Stitt said of the measure at the August event, The Oklahoman reports. “We don’t apologize for our conservative values, our God-fearing values.”
In recent years, there has been growing concern around the world over placing men who claim to be women in female prison populations, which has proven to be a means of both securing lighter treatment during incarceration and gaining easy access to women to prey upon. Transgender status also has the potential to be exploited to avoid incarceration entirely in some cases, as seen in Wales when a man who identified as a woman received a suspended sentence keeping him out of prison despite physically assaulting two women within days of each other, on the grounds that he would be “vulnerable” behind bars.
In May 2023, investigative journalist James O’Keefe released an interview with U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons psychologist Dr. Linda Noelle, who says that “male and female prisoners “both play the victim card” to obtain gender “reassignment” surgeries at taxpayer expense. “And then they go through [the far-left American Civil Liberties Union], and then the ACLU sues the [U.S. Department of Justice]” when demands for subsidized “transition” procedures are initially rejected, Noelle told O’Keefe. “And the DOJ, unfortunately, under Merrick Garland, it rolls over. It doesn’t go through the courts, so they just pay people off.”
In California in summer 2023, gender-confused male triple murderer David “Dana Rivers” Wakefield began serving his life sentence in a women’s prison. The state has allowed males to be housed with female inmates since 2021, which critics say puts actual female inmates in serious danger.
In May 2024, Hector Bravo Ferrel, a U.S. Army Iraq veteran who served the California Department of Corrections for 16 years, spoke out about his decision to resign in protest of leaders allowing male inmates to exploit “gender-affirming” policies. “They were like kids in the candy store, because they knew they were going from a men’s prison to a females’ prison,” he said.
On the national level, on his first day back in the White House this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing, among other things, that the heads of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” under their jurisdiction, although that order has been temporarily held up in court.
