I veered from my sports lane, men in women’s sports, to Shakopee Correctional Facility, men in women’s prison because, in the hierarchy of wrongs wrought by gender self-ID, men in women’s prisons tops the list. Buckle up, my friends, because we are headed for the twilight zone, the very farthest reaches, of transgender madness. To bring you up to speed, I have posted below the summary points from the Minnesota Department of Corrections transgender policy. Let this serve as a trigger warning—you will be sickened by this state-sponsored atrocity:
Case-by-case review: Placement is determined through an assessment by a Gender Identity Committee, which considers nine factors, including the inmate’s views on their own safety, security level, medical needs, and gender expression.
You read that right—a Gender Identity Committee is going to consider a convicted predator’s own views on what he really needs to feel safe and happy, what his medical needs are to live as his authentic self. Fucking, wha?! These morons are concerned for the safety and security of a lying, manipulative monster who has sexually assaulted his own children rather than the women he will be locked up with, for the love of god.
Housing requests: Incarcerated individuals can request to be housed in a facility that aligns with their gender identity.
Housing is one of the areas where one should be able to live according to one’s gender identity. Except if your housing is a jail. The Geneva Convention is pretty clear—housing males and females together is cruel and unusual punishment.
Safety is the priority: A request for a specific facility will be denied only if the committee determines it would pose a heightened risk of physical or sexual harm to the individual or others.
Of the males who have applied for and received a transfer to Shakopee, they’ve been convicted of murder, sexual assault, several of sexual assault of minors, and one of sexually assaulting his own children. These are not males with too many parking tickets. One has to wonder, who exactly the Gender Identity Committee would consider too much of a safety risk to transfer to what is supposed to be an all-female facility.
Pronouns and honorifics: At intake, individuals can choose their preferred pronouns and honorifics (She/Ms, He/Mr, or They/Mx), which must be displayed on their identification badge and used by staff. An individual can change this at any time.
Think about a fully intact, bearded, 6’2” rapist who must be referred to by women inmates and prison staff as she/Ms, every minute of every day, jerking everyone’s chain. For a manipulative sociopath, this is a dream come true. Forcing everyone to honor his pronouns punishes everyone else—the power is orgasmic. Only a politician who is never going to have to come face-to-face with this rapist could possibly have authored something this sadistic. Also, admitting that these pronouns may change at any time suggests that the state knows what we all know—predatory men will do whatever is necessary to get what they want. Gender identity is a no-brainer.
Gender-affirming care: The DOC will provide care in accordance with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) standards of care.
Breast implants? Done. Estrogen treatment? Check. Wigs? Makeup? No problem. Nevermind that those items seem cosmetic, by law it must be provided. So splurge—it’s on the Minnesota taxpayers.
Staff training: Staff members receive training on how to provide appropriate care for transgender individuals.
This victimizes the female staff who have been put in grotesque situations that arise when males must be treated as women. Yes, female staff must conduct strip (“unclothed”) searches on males if the inmate requests it. Who is in charge here? Damn straight, it’s the depraved male inmate, given power over women the likes of which even he could never have imagined.
Name changes: The DOC will honor an incarcerated person’s legal name change.
Most of these guys won’t go to the bother of changing their name. They can get all the privileges of a trans identity (see below) and still wank off with their birth name. Doesn’t it seem like someone who has bludgeoned another human being to death should give up their right to force both other inmates (women) and prison staff call him by a name he made up?
Other accommodations: The policy also addresses other accommodations like single-cell assignments and showering arrangements, which will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
In addition to being placed in with 500 of the people these men prey upon, in addition to being kowtowed to in every way, these men, the worst in our society, get the ultimate privilege in the women’s prison, where they do not belong—a single cell and private showers. Or showers shared with the women if they’d rather, which they often do. Women in a women’s prison have to work long and hard for those privileges (see Jaymie’s story below); convicted male criminals who have lied about their identity (surprise!) to be housed where they endanger women, are again, privileged. This atrocity, this staggering human rights abuse of women, by state law.
Minnesota SF1295: This bill, signed in 2025, mandates that the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee house only biological female inmates. Any non-biological female inmates currently housed there must be transferred within seven days. This change was set to expire on January 1, 2026, and could lead to the transfer of transgender women from Shakopee to other facilities.
Well huh, seven days have come and gone. Seven months have come and gone. Five criminally dangerous male packages are still living the predator’s dream at Shakopee, exerting power over women, both female inmates and staff. They can follow through on the threat of violence, as Nathan Jones (below) did, or simply enjoy causing constant fear.
After a lifetime of sex offenses including criminal sexual assault of a minor, Jones uttered the magic words—I identify as a woman—whereupon he requested and received a transfer to Shakopee women’s prison. Mere weeks after arriving at Shakopee, Jones assaulted a female inmate. This escalation from threat to actual assault did not convince the Gender Identity Committee that Jones should be moved back to the men’s prison. This can only be seen as sadism, calculated disregard for the humanity of the women there.
We followed 169 about 20 minutes south of Minneapolis, past Valleyfair amusement park, and along the main drag of Shakopee, a little river town that has never embraced suburban status. The gas station attendant told me to make a left on any street, go down to 6th Ave and follow it to a water tower to find the women’s correctional facility. “There’s a school across the street,” he said. And sure enough, smack dab in the middle of a neat residential area, Shakopee looked like any government office park with fairly modern looking low brick buildings connected by sidewalks and surrounded by a green lawn. The fence was iron, a little higher, but something I’ve seen plenty of in residential and commercial use. No ugly chain link, no razor wire, no guard towers.
It was a Sunday. We pulled into the nearly empty parking lot near a group of women. I recognized Jaymie from an Alpha News story.
Jaymie Ali spent ten months in Shakopee along with five males who, after conviction, discovered their feminine identity, and requested transfer to the women’s facility. For the women, most of whom, like Ali, are survivors of abuse at the hands of men, every day is a nightmare of fear and anxiety, reliving the complete power violent men have always had over their lives.
Ali was released just over a month ago, and is dedicated to bringing attention to this atrocious human rights abuse, and getting the male IPs (my first lesson in prisonspeak—IP is Incarcerated Person, but Ali thinks of the women as Important Persons) out of Shakopee. To that end, she organized this protest.
She thanked us, all women, for being there. Many times. Energetic and outgoing, Ali suggested a go-around—name, why we were there. We represented a mass of acronyms— WDI, DIAG, WoLF, and a nonprofit that works with incarcerated women. A couple had been in touch with Ali while she was still in Shakopee; others had just found out about the protest the night before.
Ali introduced herself as a survivor of sexual abuse, not a victim, who had no hate or bigotry, or experience, with “transgender women.” How someone wanted to identify, she said, was between him and his higher power. That changed when she came face-to-face with Bradley Sirvio, a convicted murderer who claimed a feminine identity well into his life sentence, and was transferred to Shakopee in 2023. “I was like, no, that’s not a transgender woman, that’s a whole man—beard, male genitalia. These are flat out men. These women are my sisters. I know and love them all. We took care of each other. When they let these predatory men in, it was a nightmare. It was cruel and unusual.”
As we made introductions, a car slowed and the driver opened his window, peering at our signs. We asked if he and the woman in the passenger seat were there to protest. They said they’d just been visiting their daughter—of course, Ali knew their daughter—and they knew about the men being housed there. “They tell the women they’re not trans. They’re completely open, bragging, about gaming the system to have an easier time of it,” the dad said, disgusted.
That’s when Ali explained the math behind single rooms. There are about 500 women at Shakopee and only about 30 single rooms. The list to get one of those single rooms is very long, and to get on it and stay on it, an IP must remain free of even the smallest infraction. “Handing a book to another IP? That might be considered passing. That’ll put you further down the list, or off the list,” Ali said. It takes years and considerable luck to earn a single room. But to minimize what they knew was an outrageous risk, the Department of Corrections gave males the precious single rooms from the moment they were transferred in to the women’s prison. At one point, seven of the 30 single rooms was occupied by a dangerous man who’d already proven they’re willing to break laws, norms,. and boundaries. In this Orwellian hell, you know what will get you taken off the list for a single room? Pointing out the unfairness of men getting a single room. Or pointing out that there are males in Shakopee at all.
As the sun blazed in a brilliant blue sky, we’re asked to look around at our bucolic surroundings, and compare it with men’s prisons that are out in the middle of nowhere, circled by high fences and razor wire, towers and guards with guns. Ali explains that since the women at Shakopee are largely here for lower level offenses (“Not everyone—there are some nasty women here.”) there used to be a pretty healthy schedule of classes IPs could sign up for, conducted by volunteers. “This is Camp Cupcake. But since men started being housed here, the volunteers didn’t feel safe. Those classes went away,” Ali said. “It’s the same with female staff, yeah, even male staff—no one wants these men here.”
“They’re moving,” Ali shouted, making double time to the fence. A steady stream of gray sweatsuited women (and somewhere in that number, five men) made their way from one building to another. Ali started the chant: “Hey hey, hey ho, all those men have got to go!” as we held our DIY signs up to the fence. “I love you! I love you!” Ali shouted. Two male guards in a gator appeared and parked about 20 feet inside the fence. Ali addressed them by name: “Yeah it’s me. I’m back.” After the last of the IPs had disappeared into a building, Ali explained they can’t wave or say anything or acknowledge us in any way. Not allowed.
“Oh yeah, that was the million dollar baby scheme,” Ali said, referring to Sean Windingland, a man convicted of sexually assaulting his own children. After he claimed a feminine identity, Minnesota’s Gender Identity Committee determined that this very insane nice person should be transferred to the women’s prison. He was quickly bundled back to the male prison when some “concerning allegations” arose that Windingland had had sex with a female IP with the intent of impregnating her, whereupon they could both sue the Department of Corrections for a lot of money. Allegedly, a search of his cell uncovered a bottle of semen for DIY IVF if the act itself didn’t do the trick. Apparently it was the threat of being sued that motivated the DOC to remove this predator from the women’s prison rather than any concern that female prisoners were being abused in a grotesque extortion scheme.
Ali fished around in her bag for some pieces of paper: “I came up with some other mantras.” We tried another chant but couldn’t get the rhythm right, and went back to Hey hey, hey ho, all these men have got to go. For a while we went with the call and answer: Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like! We walked along the outside of the fence and chanted and held our signs. More people had joined the group, making it about 14 in all, when a local KSTP TV station photographer came over. Ali said she had notified some media about the protest, and I too contacted KSTP, Alpha News (though that’s where I found out about the protest), Fox 9 News, MPR (just to force them to make the editorial decision to pretend this atrocity is not happening), the Star Tribune, and a couple special notes to Congresswoman Betty McCollum and Governor Tim Walz to say the only reason they are still warming their respective chairs after voting to torture female prisoners over and over again is because very few Minnesotans know, or could even conceive of it happening. And as always, I wrote, the truth would out.
The KSTP photographer shot a lot of video—Ali repeating what she’d just told us, what she’d told Alpha News, what she’s told anyone who will listen. She actually thought transgender women were some kind of woman, she had no hate in her heart. But then she realized, as someone who has suffered at the hands of men, that these are more of the same, abusive men, and the state of Minnesota has somehow, inconceivably backed them, bent over backward for them, prioritized them, even though Governor Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison (Ali is quite clear who’s made these decisions) know this madness “puts women in harm’s way.”
I shudder when I hear the euphemism “harm.” People, liberal women, who smirkingly ask, Where’s the harm? It’s rape. It’s being locked in with a hulking rapist and no one can hear you scream. That’s the harm. That’s why Ali was shaking. We stood dumbly with our signs in the background, as she got more emotional and eventually walked away in tears. We hugged her, told her she could do it. She looked skyward, made a heart with her fingers, and stepped back in front of the TV camera and continued to talk about a world and an experience so ghastly, words fall far short of the reality. Though the photographer said he too thought men in women’s prison was insane, he accepted lots of fact sheets, and spent at least 30 minutes capturing the story, as yet I haven’t seen it aired.
An old guy showed up, and by old, I mean my age. His homemade sign said something about Men and women should be together in marriage, not in prison. The back of his cap was embroidered with I love Jesus. Within a minute, he was shouting at the cameraman, daring him to get a closeup of some biblical tract he’d brought, and ranting about our country being founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Realizing we’d been hijacked, we let this spittle-flecked idiot flap his jaw in front of a dead camera, and a group with at least one lesbian, and a strong grasp of the Constitution.
A man in a long black trenchcoat and matching hat, and a woman showed up. Ali ran over and hugged the woman, another ex-IP. They talked; the tranchcoat man, who Ali called a pastor, videoed her with his phone.
Ali being new to this protest thing figured we should process around the outside of the fence. We started out in one direction, but knowing the daily schedule and the layout of the buildings, Ali suggested we reverse course and go around to the side closest to the living quarters. “They’ll be in their rooms now,” she said. When we got there, Ali wanted us to spread out with our arms outstretched—“it’s us hugging them.” We did. Ali shouted, “I love you!” Someone said, “They’re raising and lowering their blinds!” Ali said that was the women responding, saying they saw us.
Now if only everyone could see them, and the everyday horror of the state-sponsored torture of housing men in a women’s prison.
This is why I can’t forgive the Democrats—the party I’m registered with. This denial-of-reality in women's prisons is brutal. Thank you for this piece, Sarah Barker.