We've heard recently about the decline of the ACLU from principled defenders of free speech to partisan ideologues, with trans lawyer Chase Strangio leading the charge. Well, now they've gone right through the looking glass (via):
A woman was interested to know how many inmates in Washington state identify as transgender, and how many of those transgender identified inmates have been given transfers to go from men's prison to women's prison, and the reverse. To get this information, she filed a Freedom on Information Act request. Instead of getting the information she requested, she got sued by the ACLU.
To be clear, at no point had this woman contacted the ACLU to tell them she was filing a FOIA. She had used ACLU resources to figure out how to file a FOIA, but that was freely available on their website. The state of Washington is under no obligation to let the ACLU know about every FOIA request they receive, so it remains entirely unclear as to how the ACLU became aware of this woman's FOIA in the first place.
Nonetheless, instead of receiving the information she requested, she received an injunction.
In summary, then:
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against a private citizen for requesting public records from the Washington State Department of Corrections on the number of inmates in state custody who identify as transgender and the number of male inmates who are housed in women's facilities.
So now the ACLU, in contrast to its previous role of helping to unearth facts the state might want hidden, is actively going after potential whistle-blowers - at least when trans matters are concerned and there's a chance that facts might be uncovered which reflect badly on current policies relating to trans criminals. From poacher to gamekeeper, you might say.
The Washington Public Records Act guarantees that citizens have the right to access public records, and requires the government to respond to requests within five days. Only personal student or patient information, employee files, and some investigative records are exempt.
Yet by April 8, instead of the information she requested, she received an email that the ACLU of Washington Foundation and Disability Rights Washington, along with their clients "who are current and former transgender, non-binary, and intersex inmates and in the custody of Washington Department of Corrections," had personally named her in a lawsuit to prevent the information she requested from being released.
And are there legitimate concerns about current policies, then?
Indeed, that would seem to be the case.
Washington state radio host Dori Monson has detailed several accounts of women who are housed in women's prisons in the state and have been raped by gender non-conforming males who identify as transgender and have successfully been transferred into women's prisons. Monson writes that there were "two inmates moved from male to female prison. One is a serial killer who admitted to killing prostitutes and hating women, another is a sex offender charged with having sex with a 12 year old."
In California, after a bill was passed in July 2020 that authorized inmates to be housed according to gender identity and not biological sex, despite their status as regards sex reassignment surgery, more than 260 inmates have requested a transfer since the beginning of the year when the law took effect. California also has a policy of funding sex reassignment surgeries for inmates, and prior to the new law, once a biological male prisoner had undergone that surgery, namely castration, that person could be transferred to a women's prison. This resulted in the case of a notorious baby killer undergoing the surgery and then being transferred into the same prison where the women whose children he killed is housed.
Canada has had very similar problems, only instead inmates' gender identity being a matter for the states to determine on their own, the federal government has gotten involved. A bill that was passed in that country, with the backing of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has not only authorized biologically male prisoners to self-identify as women to gain access to women's prisons, but has altered the way data is recorded.
Women, including former inmates, have launched protests, but it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on because once a biological male identifies as female, the Correctional Services of Canada officially records them as female. This means, additionally, that the crimes those biological men committed before they self-identified as women are recorded as crimes committed by women. And the numbers as regards the sex-breakdown of inmates in women's prisons is not accurate. There are biological males who have not undergone sex reassignment surgery, and those who have, who are classified by the prison system as female, simply on the word of those biological men alone.
According to Canadian prisoner advocate Heather Mason, women's maximum security prisons are equivalent to men's medium security prisons, meaning that once biological males transfer from their maximum security prisons into women's maximum security prisons, they are granted a much higher degree of freedom than they would have been had they remained in the prison to which they were sentenced.
So yes, there are good reasons for concern. But the ACLU doesn't want anyone to know about them.
Update: more details here.
WoLF [Women's Liberation Front] plans to fight this lawsuit, which is clearly aimed at suppressing citizen's rights to access public records.
Lauren Adams, WoLF Legal Director said, "It is troubling both that the ACLU is seeking to silence and intimidate an individual who is petitioning their government, as well as attacking the free press."
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