The Free Press
For years, Rhonda Fleming has been trying to get male criminals out of women’s prisons. The 58-year-old, who is serving a 27-year sentence for Medicare fraud, has spent nearly a third of her life behind bars, and for most of that time, she has been in federal prisons where she says she’s been forced to share facilities, including showers and restrooms, with male felons who identify as transgender.
“When they initially arrive, they have long hair and look like they’re trying to wear makeup,” Fleming told The Free Press. “But after they have achieved the goal of getting into a women’s prison, they start letting their beard and their mustache grow out, they get a haircut like a man, and they’re walking around like a guy.”
In January 2023, Fleming filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons to end the policy of putting trans-identifying males in women’s prisons. Though many similar lawsuits have dropped over the past decade, Fleming’s is the first to make it to trial. On Tuesday in Tallahassee, Florida, a judge will hear her argument that the conditions of her confinement violate her constitutional right to bodily privacy.
A victory for Fleming won’t lead to a nationwide injunction, but it could set an important precedent, giving female prisoners in similar situations a greater chance of success in the courtroom. “Clearly, there’s something to be done here,” said lawyer Jeffrey Bristol who, along with his colleague Diego Pestana, is representing Fleming.
In her suit, Fleming argues she has been exposed to male genitalia in communal toilets and showers and was forced to expose her naked body in these settings on multiple occasions while incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida, as well as at other federal prisons.
Bristol says Fleming has been housed with at least 10 biological men in the federal prison system. He said there were at least two males at FCI Tallahassee when Fleming was there. “Due to the nature of the close-quartered environment of these communal prison showers, Ms. Fleming’s private parts and genitalia were regularly exposed to C.J. and E.T.—both biological males,” claims her suit, using initials to refer to other inmates. That happened “at least twice daily” in the case of “E.T.”
Women inmates are afraid and “hurry in the shower. They don’t linger in the bathroom,” Fleming told me. “When you’re most vulnerable, you’re naked in a shower. There’s no officer monitoring the showers unless some kind of emergency happens, and so at any time, anything can happen to you.”
The warden of the prison, Erica Strong, does not dispute that males have access to these facilities, but argues in a legal brief that because there are toilet partitions and shower curtains, Fleming maintains a right to privacy. But Fleming told me the curtains are so flimsy—and often so filthy—that inmates leave them completely open to avoid touching them.
In her brief, Strong added, “The Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) cannot—and will not—risk the safety of transgender individuals, or subject itself to increased litigation, because Plaintiff does not like being housed with someone she views as different than her—a natal male living as a transgender woman, someone she views as ‘choosing’ a contrary gender identity.”
All 29 federal female prisons in the U.S. allow male criminals who identify as women to be incarcerated. This practice began in the early 2010s under the Obama administration. At the time, prisons were experiencing an uptick in the number of male inmates identifying as transgender, and they requested guidance over where to place these prisoners. In 2012, the Department of Justice developed a “transgender offender manual,” which allowed “housing by gender identity when appropriate,” regardless of “genital status.”
Between 2018 and 2020, the Trump administration pushed back on this, asserting that biological sex should be the “initial determination” for placement, allowing for gender identity–based placement “in rare cases.” But the Biden-era Department of Justice revoked this change. At the last count on October 6, 2024, there are 1,487 incarcerated men who identify as women in federal prisons. According to the Bureau of Prisons’ own data, nearly half of transgender prisoners in women’s facilities are sex offenders—almost four times the rate of the general prison population.
A second Trump term might reduce this number through stricter gatekeeping. But for now, there is no objective criteria, such as surgery or hormones, required to secure a transfer in any federal women’s prison. Many of the 143 state female prison facilities in the U.S. also allow the practice, with California offering the country’s most permissive policies.
“There’s very quiet but broad awareness that this law is not working, even for people who supported it in the first place,” said Lauren Bone, legal director of the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a feminist group that has launched a legal challenge against California’s law. “I don’t know if they just thought people won’t lie.”
Since the policies went into place, there have been multiple reports of sexual assault by male trans-identifying inmates toward female inmates. One woman who sued Rikers Island jail in New York in 2020, alleged that, after arriving in her cell, a male inmate introduced himself by saying, “I’m not transgender. I’m straight. I like women,” before groping and later raping her. Another female claimed she was raped in the prison shower by her six-feet-two-inches, 200-pound, bearded male attacker. In 2022, a trans-identifying male in a New Jersey women’s prison impregnated two prisoners.
As a bare minimum, says Bone, prisons have to stop allowing “sex offenders and men with penises” in women’s prisons.
Fleming recalls the first time she found out biological males had been admitted into women’s prisons. It was 2010 and she had been sent to the Security Housing Unit, “The SHU,” at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, an isolation unit for disruptive inmates. There was a prisoner there, around five feet, nine inches, who “beat up a very small Hispanic woman.”
“I witnessed three male officers taking the person out of the SHU. . . . They told him that if you ever put your hands on a woman in this prison, they were going to deal with him,” said Fleming. Later, when they had put the inmate back in the cell, Fleming asked one of the officers what happened. He told her, “This is a man, and he is in here because he is identified as a woman, but he was born a male and he’s not going to be in our prison jumping on y’all.” FMC Carswell did not respond to a request for comment from The Free Press.
Jeanette Driever, 47, served six years at FMC Carswell for conspiracy to drug trafficking. There, she met Fleming and the two became close friends. “When they started bringing transgender inmates over it was culture shock for everybody,” said Driever, 47. “They’re 100-plus pounds heavier than us, they’re way taller than us, their muscle density is stronger than ours, but behavior-wise they came over controlling, dominant. They wanted us to be submissive to them.”
Fleming agreed, saying that in the dinner line, “the men just walk in front of you, sometimes aggressively shoulder-checking you.”
The prison authorities “didn’t give us a heads up,” she said. “They just show up one day. You’re expected to shower with them. You’re expected to use the bathroom with them.”
Driever, who said she has been a victim of rape, was especially sensitive to the presence of biological men in women’s spaces. “There were just a lot of things that I did to protect myself, and one of those was never to be alone with them, or never to be in the same area as them,” she said. “I would be aware of my surroundings at all times.”
Driever, who worked as a medical assistant at the prison, said she asked for night shifts to help her avoid the five biological men incarcerated there. In 2017, she and Fleming, along with two others, took the case to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, challenging the Obama-era guidelines. (The suit was later dismissed.) But as a result of raising the complaint, Driever and Fleming say they were threatened and verbally abused by trans-identifying inmates. They said “they were going to beat us up, they were going to target our families,” Driever said. After that, she barely left her cell.
Driever says that though “90 percent of the women” felt uncomfortable about the presence of males, only a tiny percentage would “say anything or complain about it because of retaliation.”
In December 2024, three female inmates wrote affidavits in support of Fleming’s lawsuit. Temesia Green testified in her affidavit that she had been “held in a locked cell, 24 hours a day, with a biological male” while at FMC Carswell.
“This male inmate exposed himself (including his genitalia) throughout the time we were locked in the cell together,” she wrote. “At FMC Carswell and FTC Oklahoma, I have felt degraded and humiliated because I have been forced to be naked in the presence of biological male inmates, who clearly are attracted to women.”
In 2020, California passed the “Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act,” which entitles all prisoners to be housed according to their self-declared gender identity rather than biological sex. Since it went into effect in 2021, six female inmates in California, all of whom have been victims of domestic and sexual abuse, have challenged the law, and were represented by WoLF.
Four transgender inmates are now fighting WoLF’s challenge of the California law. One is Tremaine Carroll, a biological male and a violent offender. After identifying as transgender, Carroll was moved to the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, where it is alleged that he raped two women, intimidated a witness (one of his alleged victims), and impregnated a prisoner. The women’s prison has since begun dispensing condoms to inmates. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite having been moved back to a men’s prison, Carroll continues to be an “intervener” in the lawsuit, arguing for the right to be housed with women. Carroll has pleaded not guilty to two counts of rape and one count of dissuading a witness from testifying. Attorney Joe Goethals told the Daily Mail in June 2024 that Carroll “never had any nonconsensual sexual relations of any kind” at CCWF. (Goethals told The Free Press that he no longer represents Carroll and could not comment on the case.)
Other states have moved in the opposite direction from California. Last year, Louisiana passed a law requiring use of bathroom and sleeping quarters in schools, shelters, and state prisons to be based on a person’s biological sex observed at birth. Utah has passed a similar law. But whatever state laws are passed won’t affect federal prisons, which depend on action from the Department of Justice or Congress. The Federal Bureau of Prisons at the Department of Justice did not give a comment to The Free Press as of press time.
In the last election cycle, transgender policies were a political liability for Democrats. Biden described bans on medicalized gender transitions for kids as “close to sinful” despite a majority of Americans supporting them. Polls show that 77 percent of Americans disagree with allowing biological males to be housed in women’s prisons. Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments promising government-funded transition surgeries for the incarcerated was weaponized in a 2024 Trump ad.
Matt Sharp, a lawyer with the conservative legal firm ADF, is hopeful that with revised regulations Trump could help put a stop to biological men entering female federal prisons. Beyond that, Congress could pass a bill requiring that imprisonment be based on sex observed at birth, such as the one introduced by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) in 2023. Or one of the lawsuits, such as WoLF’s challenge to California’s law, could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court.
Bone agrees that there needs to be an “end to the entitlement” biological men feel to be housed in women’s prisons. There is “no reasonable argument” for allowing males to self-identify their way into women’s prisons, she said. “It has to be easy to say no, and it has to be easy to remove them if they’re causing problems.”
