SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A Republican lawmaker is pushing a new bill that would seclude female transgender prisoners from cisgender women prisoners in California correctional facilities.

State Sen. Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield, announced Senate Bill 311 Thursday, calling it a “proactive step” that addresses “growing concerns about current housing policies in women’s prisons.”

“SB 311 is a direct response to the alarming reality that women are being assaulted and raped in our California women’s prisons,” she said.

Grove’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether there is specific data or reports of violence perpetrated by trans women that inspired the bill.

The bill would require the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to create separate living and bathroom quarters for transgender women “in order to protect the security needs of biological women,” according to the bill. The bill would also prohibit prisoners convicted of certain sexual offenses from being housed in women’s prisons.

California’s trans inmates in the spotlight

Grove’s bill runs counter to California lawmakers’ efforts in recent years to affirm and protect transgender people in prison.

In 2020, California passed a law to allow transgender prisoners to more easily be housed with others of their gender identity. SB 132, known as the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” requires the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to ask people about their gender identity and house people largely according to their preference. Grove voted against it.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who authored SB 132, called Grove’s new bill “a deeply unserious, harmful and cynical distraction from the real work of ending sexual violence in prison.”

“The bill pushes false and slanderous narratives demonizing transgender people as predators, when trans people are overwhelmingly victims of sexual violence, not perpetrators,” he said. “Nor does the bill do anything to address the actual dominant cause of sexual violence in women’s prisons: rape by prison staff.”

A 2011-2012 nationwide survey of inmates by the federal Bureau of Justice found that about 35% of transgender people held in prisons and roughly the same amount held in jails experienced one or more incidents of sexual assault perpetrated by staff or other inmates.

A 2020 report conducted by the Office of the Inspector General collected many of the challenges faced by transgender prisoners in California correctional facilities before the law was changed.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into California’s two women’s prisons due to allegations of widespread sexual abuse by correctional officers. In December, the U.S. government paid about $1.1 million each to 103 women who say they were victims of sexual misconduct by staff at a federal prison in Dublin.

In 2017, California became the first state to pay for a transgender prisoner’s gender-reassignment surgery, after years of fighting in the courts. The issue became a pillar of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, when he spent millions on attack ads highlighting Kamala Harris’ support for transgender prisoners’ access to gender-affirming medical treatment.

According to a 2023 CalMatters report, 20 incarcerated people have received gender-affirming surgery since 2017, and another 150 surgeries have been approved. That same report quoted CDCR as having approved 35 of 364 housing transfer requests since 2021.

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