Case Update: ACLU, Lambda Legal, and Transgender Law Center Granted Right to Intervene in CA Prison Lawsuit, Chandler v. CDCR
Traditionally liberal organizations have abandoned women and are now leading the fight to house male offenders in women’s prisons
On Monday, the judge in the case of Chandler v. CDCR, a groundbreaking legal case funded by the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) in support of incarcerated women, ruled that four men and the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (“TGIJP”) have the right to intervene in the case.
Case Background
The case centers around California’s SB 132 (Cal. Pen. Code § 2606(a)(3)), a 2021 California law that entitles incarcerated men who self-identify as transgender or nonbinary to request housing in women’s correctional facilities. The state has already transferred dozens of the 300+ men with penises - one-third of them sex offenders who are newly eligible for transfer under this bill.
This law has already directly resulted in harm to incarcerated women in California, including WoLF’s four plaintiffs — Janine Chandler, Tomiekia Johnson, Krystal Gonzalez, and Nadia Romero. They have already experienced sexual assault and harassment, threats, and decreased quality of life which together amount to cruel and unusual punishment, and violations of others of their constitutional rights including freedom of speech and religion, and the promise of equal protection.
ACLU & Male Inmates Intervene
This week, the judge in the case ruled on a motion to intervene by TGIJP as well as four men who want to be housed in women’s prisons. These intervenors — Kelli (Kelly) Blackwell, Katie Brown, Tremayne Carroll, and Jennifer Rose — are represented by lawyers at the Transgender Law Center, the ACLU, and Lambda Legal, As intervenors, they are now full parties to the case.
Organizations like the ACLU and Lambda Legal, which formerly fought to protect civil liberties and gay rights, argue that the California Department of Corrections (CDCR), has not gone far enough in implementing SB 132. In its filing, the ACLU argued that CDCR does not “have the wide discretion they claim: the text of SB 132 commands nothing less than full implementation.”
In a press release from last year, the Transgender Law Center stated that they “are intervening to defend it from the bigoted distortions and flagrant misrepresentations of the anti-trans groups challenging this law.”
They argued that the CDCR could not deny men transfer to women’s prisons based on their criminal or disciplinary history, including when the man is a known threat to women. Indeed, one-third of the males transferred into California’s two female facilities are convicted sex offenders, and women in both locations have already reported the occurrence of rape, thanks to these policies.
Transgender Law Center: Gender Extremists Aiming to Eliminate Sex From Law
The Transgender Law Center also represents the intervenors, and are some of the most extreme gender ideologues working in the legal sphere. Shawn Meerkamper, the lead TLC lawyer on the case, has written about how allowing men to create the legal fiction of sex change is not enough. He advocates for the “constitutional queering of sex,” stating that “It is time to start talking about genderqueers as a legal class… Government sex classification causes harm to those who defy or otherwise trouble classification.”
Likewise, Dylan Vade, Co-founder of the Transgender Law Center, has described even mainstream transactivism as “not radical enough,” stating:
“Gender is much bigger than a line. It is at least a three-dimensional space, but not a Cartesian one, not a space created by three lines. There are no lines, no ordering. There is just space—an infinite space, a space that allows motion. I have gender claustrophobia and need a big space. I do not like it when people tell me that I have to identify as female or male. I also do not like it when people tell me that, because it is not radical enough, I cannot identify as female or male. I need a big space in which everyone’s gender has a space, and in which our genders are not hierarchically ordered. Thus, a conception that works for me is a galaxy.”
Traditional Liberal Organizations Abandon Women
Women should be able to trust that organizations like the ACLU have their back — but, sadly, that hasn’t been the case for years. In 2021, the ACLU intervened in a Washington state case led by WoLF in an attempt to cover up the fact that male rapists were being housed with women. Despite being the very same organization that provides training on how to conduct Public Records Requests, the ACLU suddenly turned against the public’s right to information when it risks revealing the truth about men being housed in women’s prisons. WoLF’s fight in this case revealed over 300 pages of Prison Rape Elimination Action (PREA) infractions against just one of the many men transferred into the Washington women’s prisons.
WoLF remains undaunted in our fight to protect women’s rights, even in the face of betrayal from the organizations that claim to support civil liberties. All of the evidence shows that when men “self-identify” into women’s prisons, women are the ones who suffer.
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