Hide the Men, Hide the Court, Hide the Case. Silence the Women. And, GO SLOW.
November 17, 2025
What follows is a guest post by the Honorable Elpeth Cypher, a retired Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice. She joined the board of the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) in 2025. The post derives from a presentation she gave during the 2025 convention of Women’s Declaration International USA.
Before getting to her post, I want to note that the fact of men being housed in women’s prisons across the county should be a national scandal. As Elspeth explains, it is not an exaggeration to say that male convicted rapists and murderers are being held in locked prison cells with vulnerable women. Not a single mainstream legacy media outlet will cover this. It is utterly shameful. And when we TERFs try to explain this to our liberal family members, they don’t believe us. “Surely if this were happening,” they often say, “I would have read about it in the New York Times or heard about it on MSNBC.” One would think so.
Yesterday, the Minnesota State Contact for WDI USA led a group of women in standing outside the women’s prison in Minnesota to protest the practice of housing men in women’s prisons. I watched the livestream and it was so good to see so many women taking a strong stand and speaking out. You can watch the recording here.
Thanks to Elspeth for this contribution!
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Hide the Men, Hide the Court, Hide the Case. Silence the Women. And, GO SLOW.
By Hon. Elspeth B. Cypher (ret), November 2025.
This adult human female is frustrated. I am witnessing how current prison policies, shaped by decades of transgender advocacy and court involvement, sacrifice women’s safety, rights, and dignity. Despite overwhelming and growing evidence exposing the risks to women of housing transgender-identifying male inmates in women’s prisons, legal maneuvers and enforced secrecy silence women and conceal these harms. No one considered the interests of incarcerated women when devising and implementing these policies. It does not appear that anyone considered the women to be necessary parties.
In January 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Its goal was simple yet vital: enforce sex-segregated custody based on biological sex to protect women’s safety. This policy promised to reverse damaging trends and respond to women prisoners’ safety concerns.
The order was met with fierce legal challenges from transgender plaintiffs and activists. Courts swiftly issued injunctions blocking the order, again placing transgender feelings above women’s documented physical injuries. But, then again, without any women as parties to this litigation, or experts to point out the obvious, how could the court know better? Should a judge be on watch for necessary parties? (Yes). But the narrative of the endangered transgender identifying man is a strong prevailing myth and appears to cloud vision and judgment. No one sees the women.
Women are more than necessary parties. We are indispensable parties. An indispensable party is a person or entity that must be included in a lawsuit. If such a party is not included, the court cannot fairly or equitably resolve the dispute because the indispensable party has rights or interests that are affected by the outcome. Women’s rights and interests should have been considered in every case that purported to represent “women” (transgender identified men). Women’s rights and interests are invisible. None of the judges in these cases can say that they have fairly or equitably resolved the dispute because none of them considered the interests of women.
The story of the endangered transgender identifying man is a myth. As pointed out by the group Roar, “Female prisoners are routinely harassed, attacked, and sexually assaulted by the men they are forced to share cells, showers, and toilets with. In some prisons, women take turns staying awake to safeguard each other against attacks by men in the night.” Amie Ichikawa, who founded the group Woman II Woman has noted:
CDCR transferred another person from MEN’s DEATH ROW in SAN QUENTIN to the CENTRAL CALIFORNIA WOMEN’s FACILITY into women’s general population in the HONOR DORM. This person, of course, has a sparkly stripper name now, so I can’t look up their case nor do I know their real name. This is insanely unsafe.
I have attached at the end of this article a list of the injuries inflicted by specific prisoners on women in prison.
The men’s lawyers filed several complaints for preliminary injunctions to stop the order from going into effect. These complaints were filed in different federal district courts. The courts granted their requests for temporary injunctions, preventing the men from being transferred, at least until the courts had a chance to “rule on the merits” of the complaint. The men had argued that transferring them out of the women’s prison and into a men’s prison would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. But there was no consideration of the cruel or unusual punishment visited upon the women every day caused by the housing of men with them. I learned about these cases from news media coverage.
The cases were consolidated and sent to a federal district court for further proceedings. Like the men’s names, the location of the court receiving the cases was never disclosed. As a result, finding this lawsuit proved to be extraordinarily difficult. The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF, of which I am secretary of the board), a small non-profit organization, recounted in a court motion just how hard it was to even identify the case despite persistent efforts. Because the plaintiffs proceeded under pseudonyms—names like “Jane Doe” and “Sarah Doe” —and the court permitted the covering up of not just the prisoner’s names but also the locations of the facilities where they were held, tracking the lawsuit as an outsider became an exercise in tedious guesswork.
As WoLF explained to the court, limited funding and staff did not allow us to pursue vague case captions such as “Doe v. Bondi” in every federal jurisdiction, especially when there was no public disclosure of key information to clarify which “Doe” case was moving forward. The only way we learned the correct case name and docket number was because of our direct contact with women incarcerated in federal prisons. One imprisoned woman told me that a man in her unit was a plaintiff in the suit and that he said the oral argument was scheduled for September 5th in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for Washington D.C. This information proved to be accurate, but for WoLF it came too late. Oral argument had already been set. The time for filing amicus briefs without special permission had passed. Nevertheless, we filed an amicus brief and a motion requesting that the brief be accepted late. Our motion was denied. I was not surprised by that decision; we were late and were only able to file our brief the day before argument.
The obstacles created by the court’s redaction of identifying information effectively left advocates in the dark and drastically limited our ability to advocate for incarcerated women affected by being housed with trans-identifying inmates. Measures designed to protect plaintiffs’ identities prevented participation by groups representing the interests of women prisoners who faced credible risk. Our late filing was not due to neglect or lack of diligence, but because essential details were hidden behind layers of confidentiality and bureaucracy. There are, in fact, many cases filed as “Doe v. Bondi,” and without facility names or case numbers, advocates must navigate a legal labyrinth to determine which is the one about men in women’s prisons.
Women’s prisons were created to shield female inmates from male violence, a core human rights principle. The first women’s prison was established in 1873 to protect women from abuse when housed with men. Yet today, policies allow biological males identifying as women to be housed with women, ignoring basic biological realities and the resulting danger. The data is stark: these men continue male criminal patterns, with more than half convicted of sex offenses—about four times the rate among the general prison population. Every minute that passes without correcting this is another minute the United States violates international law and the Hague Convention, both of which require single sex prisons.
It is almost impossible to bring women to the attention of the courts. And, even when we can, the case proceeds slowly. Very slowly. For example, in November, 2021, the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), filed a lawsuit in federal court in California on behalf of women incarcerated with men in California prisons, California v. Chandler. WoLF alleged that housing men with women violated the women’s first amendment (freedom of speech and religious freedom), eighth amendment (cruel and unusual punishment), and fourteenth amendment rights (equal protection). The case moved slowly and was dismissed in May, 2024, with leave to file an amended complaint. WoLF, along with Dhillon Law Firm and Campbell, Miller and Payne as our outside counsel, filed a new complaint in July, 2024. The case was renamed to reflect several new women plaintiffs and a new Secretary of the Department of Corrections (CDCR) Jeff MacComber. In October of 2024 the defendants and the ACLU, as intervenors, moved to dismiss this second complaint. WoLF and Campbell, Miller and Payne filed an opposition to the response in November 2024. As I write this, we are still waiting for an answer from the court, meanwhile the women in the California women’s prison continue to suffer daily psychological and physical abuse from the men. See our case timeline for more information.
The harm to the women prisoners is not only physical. Transgender-identifying men often receive special privileges—ranging from housing choices to cosmetic treatments and certain female underwear—which are not afforded to female inmates. The women live day after day in an environment where women’s rights and safety are overshadowed by the paramount interests of transgender males. Women see that their physical safety and concerns are invisible and that they simply do not count when balanced against the feelings of men.
The frustration I experienced with Doe v. Bondi is not unique. It is shared by the women in prison and by the women fighting to get the men out of their prison. Facing the stark reality that policies allowing men to self-identify into women’s prisons directly violate internationally recognized rights meant to keep women safe from male violence is painful. Certainly, the United States should be able to remember women.
Women in the justice system are already overwhelmingly survivors of abuse, with 86% of incarcerated women having experienced some form of it, and their involvement with the law is largely a consequence of their victimization by men. The rates of violent crime committed by women are much lower than for men, and when women do commit violent acts, it is often in response to trauma from abusive partners. The presence of male inmates poses a constant threat.
Legal secrecy, pseudonyms, and suppressive policies hide the truth from public view. Women who speak out face professional retaliation, social isolation, or worse. Courts repeatedly trivialize women’s risks by citing the comparatively small transgender population in female prisons, ignoring that even a single male prisoner causes irreparable harm and major disruption.
For adult human females, a/k/a/ women, the ongoing disregard for our safety and rights by transgender advocacy and court complicity is intolerable. Women are silenced, neglected, and sacrificed to appease ideological agendas and legal technicalities. Courts and policymakers must put biology and evidence first, enforce sex-segregated custody, and break this ruthless cycle of silence and harm. Women deserve justice, protection, and a voice.
Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls noted in a report that “The disregard for the centrality of sex in the experiences of women and girls, including experiences of discrimination and violence for being female, is a human rights issue.” She delivered these remarks as part of her work emphasizing the importance of recognizing biological sex in laws and policies related to discrimination and violence against women and girls, observing that “There is more awareness that the conflation of sex, gender and gender identity is having profound negative consequences on the rights of everyone in society, including women and girls, but not only.”
Why did legacy women’s organizations and civil rights organizations place gender identity above sex? We are indispensable parties in all aspects of the world. Did no one even wonder, “where are the women in this?” We are here. Join us in fighting to restore women’s rights to single sex prisons.
For more information about how you can help:
Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF)
Women’s Declaration Internation USA (WDI)
Some of the Male Inmates Who Harmed Incarcerated Women and Links to News Articles About Them
Andre Patterson (“Janiah Monroe”)
Patterson, who is over six feet tall, strangled his cellmate in a men’s prison with his bare hands. After being moved to an Illinois women’s prison, he raped a female inmate and sexually assaulted multiple others.
Cole raped his female cellmate in a county jail in Ohio.
Saldana was housed in a Pennsylvania women’s prison for over a year. He sexually harassed multiple female inmates and was only transferred out of the facility after he reported being the victim of an assault.
Nathan Goninan (“Nonnie Marcella Lotusflower”)
Lotusflower was placed in a women’s prison in Washington after sexually assaulting and raping a teen girl. While there, he assaulted a female correctional officer, sexually assaulted a female inmate, and punched another inmate in the face. He has repeatedly threatened female inmates and staff during violent outbursts.
There are many, many more. For links to more male prisoners, please go to the appendix of WoLF’s brief.
This needed to be said and Judge Cypher said it well. It makes me ill to think of how women are constantly being thrown under the bus to accommodate fetishists' feelings.
Thanks to Judge Cypher for this lucid, necessary essay, and for all the hard work the organizations listed are doing to fight for the rights of imprisoned women. Thanks, also, to Kara, for posting this essay. I have restacked and hope this will be widely read and shared.