Tag: women’s prisons

FIST Endorses HR 1015 and SB 1147

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Feminists in Struggle has voted to endorse two bills in the U.S. Congress: HR 1015, the Prison Rape Prevention Act of 2025, and S1147, the Defining Male and Female Act of 2025. Both of these bills, though brought by Republicans, Congresswoman Nancy Mace and Senator Roger Marshall respectively, conform to FIST’s principles of working to preserve separate spaces for women, and ending the conflation of gender ‘identity’ and sex.

Female prisoners are suffering greatly in states run by Democrats, like California, Washington, and Illinois, which have allowed male inmates, many of whom are sex offenders, to self-ID their way into the women’s prisons. These men are raping, impregnating, and brutalizing the women, and it is the women who are the ones being disciplined if they lodge complaints. This outrageous injustice must end.

We ask anyone who cares about the rights of women and who acknowledges the scientific, material reality of sex to urge their representatives to support both HR 1015 and S 1147. We cannot allow the cruel and unusual punishment of women in our jails or the pernicious sex denialism of gender ideology to continue to rob women and girls of their identity as an immutable sex class. Femaleness is not a costume. It is a biological, unchangeable fact.

For more information, see Keep Prisons Single Sex and Kara Dansky’s The Abolition of Sex.

Impressions from the WDI Convention, Growing the Women’s Liberation Movement, Sept. 19-21 2025

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by Denice Traina

This piece is the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the positions of Feminists In Struggle as an organization.

It was such an immense pleasure to be in the same room with women who have literally been on the front lines, in the streets and the courts defending our sex-based rights as females. Some in the audience had been at it for some time , Donna Hughes and Lauren Leavy, while for others it was their first time participating in a women only conference! Women from all over the states from Montana, TX to NYC and Canada came together to share their knowledge, experiences, and stories and to learn from one another and most of all, to support one another. There were numerous opportunities for structured as well as non structured networking. Ask the karaoke crowd.

Kara Dansky, articulate as usual, opened the weekend with an update on progress made and the need for continued vigilance and push back against local and national policies that remain to be challenged formally in the courts and in the media in order to protect the sex=based rights of women and girls. She also made herself available for a book signing of her second book titled, The Reckoning.

The panels included a number of thought provoking topics, among them, Feminism in the Jewish and Muslim communities in Middle eastern countries involved in conflict,  presentations on Desisting, Detransitioners, the seemingly successful fight to save women’s sports, the Effect of pornography on women’s lives and Advocacy Efforts to Protect women in Prison. One speaker presented an historical review and investigation into How to Combat Misogynoir in the Postmodern Era.

It was inspiring to hear from mothers of student athletes, coaches and the athletes themselves about how it felt to be forced to accept rules that might actually be harmful to women and girls and how organizations like ICONS, Independent Council on Women’s Sports, are helping to resist the insanity and support the sex-based rights of our young women.

It wasn’t easy to select which panels to attend, they were all very interesting.

The rally at the NCAA headquarters, Hall of Champions, was the perfect action to end the conference and to leave an otherwise welcoming city behind.

 

 

FIST Joins Protests to Keep Prisons Single Sex

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On February 26th feminists in the UK kicked off a week of global events to bring attention to the threat to women and girls from male criminals placed in female prisons around the world. Photos from these events will be uploaded to the Internet and sent to the media worldwide.

The goal of this global effort is to raise awareness of the harmful policies that place incarcerated women and girls in living conditions with dangerous male criminals. In the UK, 49% of the male criminals who identify as women are rapists, sex abusers, and pedophiles. Why are such men allowed access to this most vulnerable population of women and girls ?

Women and girls in prison, jails, and juvenile detention centers are among the most vulnerable in the world, and often have a history of having been sexually victimized. Allowing male criminals who identity as women into female prisons puts women and girls at risk of serious assault, rape, and even death. The policies allowing men in women’s prisons are based on unscientific ideas that humans can change their biological sex.

In January 2021 SB 132, the so-called “Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act“, took effect in California, which allows male prisoners who self-identify as “trans” to be housed in women’s prisons, putting women prisoners at serious risk of harm without regard to their safety. The San Francisco BayView National Black Newspaper published a letter by Ayanna Green to Scott Weiner, the author of the bill, and cc’d to Governor Newsom, among other officials, pointing out the blatant unfairness to women prisoners currently being practiced due to SB 132. 

On February 27, women gathered in Redwood City, CA to initiate the US effort to shed light on the reckless policies that place incarcerated women and girls at risk from male criminals who identify as women. Rallies are planned by Keep Prisons Single Sex USA throughout the country.

FIST members participated in the protest at the San Mateo County building in Redwood City, and also participated in a similar protest in Chicago on March 6th. We must stand together and stop these abusive policies worldwide.

FIST quoted in the Economist!

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Ann Menasche from FIST was recently interviewed by The Economist about transgender-identified males being placed in women’s prisons. This is already the law in California. The reporter recognized that there is a conflict of rights here and that male violence is pervasive. She was sympathetic to FIST’s position that women’s sex-based rights to privacy, dignity, and safety mattered and that sex and gender identity are not the same thing.

We are slowly starting to break down the wall of silence and complicity in the media and getting our voices heard.  It is very important that the media begin to cover these issues in an unbiased manner, rather than acceding to the demands of the transgender lobby to present only that viewpoint. We recommend the media follow the WoLF Media+Style+Guide which outlines a way to report on these issues in a more balanced manner.