Coming out like a young boxer at the first bell, President Trump issued 200 Executive Orders (EOs) in the first few days of his new term in office, many of which conservatives and libertarians saw as utterly essential, because they reverse previous EOs or policies that conspired to crush freedom, free enterprise, energy recovery, and even the truth about gender being biologically assigned.
One of those EOs has not received a great deal of attention, but it’s a radical change from a dangerous and deluded policy that put people in danger because it pushed males into the female population of prisons.
Thomas English reports for The Daily Caller News Foundation:
“President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday barring biological males — who account for 15% of inmates in women’s federal prisons — from occupying women’s federal detention facilities.”
FIFTEEN PERCENT.
Why government has done this might remain a mystery for the ages. Just the idea of transferring to female detention facilities convicted criminal males who pretend to be female is absurd, for reasons of truth, logic, and safety. But there also is the potential of pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases to consider.
“Several incidents of rape and sexual assault involving biological male inmates in female facilities have surfaced in recent years. A biological male at Rikers Island in New York City was convicted in 2022 of raping a female inmate while housed in the women’s prison wing. A similar case occurred in 2024, where another biological male was convicted in California of raping a female inmate in the showers of the prison’s female facilities.”
Incredible. Yet, we discover, one-sixth of the population in US women’s prisons is MALE?
That’s a big problem, and that’s not all.
Trump’s EO goes further than barring the absurd transfer of men into the women’s prisons. It addresses another major ethical and practical problem that, over the last thirty years, has become more and more prevalent in detention facilities: tax-funded so-called “gender transition” medical procedures and so-called “therapy.”
“The order, which prohibits federal funds for gender transition medical procedures, drugs and treatment, mandates that the federal government only recognize male and female sexes and requires inmates to be housed according to their biological sex. Of the 10,047 total inmates in women’s federal facilities, 1,538 are biological males, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
‘The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security shall ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers,’ the order reads. It adds that no federal funds shall be expended for ‘any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.’”
That last bit is a good addition, reiterating that, regardless of surgical or chemical attacks on the human body, men remain men, and women remain women. And there’s more.
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The EO also ends another dangerous and frightening Biden policy, that of allowing MEN to enter domestic abuse shelters built and operated to protect WOMEN.
“The order also reversed the past policy of allowing biological males into ostensibly ‘single-sex’ domestic abuse shelters for women and mandated that government-issued identification reflect the bearer’s biological sex — meaning no ‘X’ marker designating an undefined or unlisted gender will be recognized.”
For those wondering about federalism, and whether this EO – as sensible as it is – applies to state facilities, the answer is, no. Trump’s order focuses on the federal prison system, and even LGBTQ-oriented publication The Advocate acknowledges that Trump is focusing on the 2003 “Prison Rape Enforcement Act,” an over-broad statute that went far beyond protecting men in prisons from being raped (which ought to be prohibited without such a statute, in the first place). The ambiguous language of that act has been a problem since it was passed, and has been used to engage in these terrible “men in women’s prisons” and “tax-funds for ‘transitioning’” practices.
In a sane world, that statute would not have passed as worded, and the problem only now is being addressed, thanks to Trump’s Executive Order.
The matter of state policy is different, but only by a small degree, because the Fourteenth Amendment mandates that if states have statutes prohibiting criminal acts such as rape and assault, they are required to protect people equally.
Introducing criminal men into a women’s prison system decreases the degree of safety in which those women are forced to live, which is a clear breach of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The deeper moral problem of forcing taxpayers to fund this insanity comes to light as the takeaway, but, of course, it is just one of many facets of federal sentencing, prison operations, and jurisprudence that all collectivized policing systems introduce. On a philosophical level, any collectivist system forces together people who have differing opinions as to how that system should operate.
In this case, Donald Trump has taken action to protect women from a terrible, over-broad federal statute.
It remains unclear as to when Trump’s new Executive Branch will be enacted, but many people likely will see it as a good start to reform a federal prison system that has been malfunctioning for many generations.