“Feminists have long pointed out that right and left have developed their own, differing routes to exploiting women. To suggest feminists who call out left wing bullshit are therefore in support of right wing bullshit is to vastly underestimate how much bullshit there is.”
—Victoria Smith, Twitter 8/6/2022
In February of 2022, I wrote and recorded a song about Tomiekia, an incarcerated plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections in California. A recent California law allows any male, including those who have not had surgery or taken hormones, to be locked up with women in state prisons. In February, I submitted a written declaration and testified publicly to oppose yet another “progressive” bill in Washington state aiming to establish mixed-sex prisons. Since writing my song and testifying, more rapes and assaults have been reported not only in California and Washington, but in prisons throughout the world where these policies have been adopted.
I continue to correspond regularly with Tomiekia in the Central California Women’s Facility, and the situation for her and other women has only gotten worse. Recently, she and others were held in solitary confinement (supposedly for their safety) after making a complaint about a trans-identified male’s harassing behavior in her living space. She also passed on a report about a recent drugging and rape that happened to a fellow inmate by another trans-identified male.
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Laws that allow males into women’s prisons are anti-progressive and anti-women. Like women in rape crisis centers, women in prison need single-sex spaces. If you self-identify as a progressive or a liberal, this is an issue you should care about deeply, because women—right now—are being hurt. This should not be flattened into a one-dimensional Right versus Left debate. These draconian laws are cruel to one of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in our society: incarcerated women.
Read more: Reality’s Last Stand
