More than five years after California began allowing biologically male inmates to transfer into women’s prisons on the basis of a transgender identity, an advocate for female prisoners says the policy has delivered exactly the population state officials promised it would exclude β and that prison authorities responded to the resulting sexual activity by installing condom vending machines.
Amie Ichikawa, founder of the nonprofit Woman II Woman and a former inmate at the Central California Women’s Facility, made the claims in comments published by The Daily Wire. Ichikawa served nearly five years at the facility before her release in 2013 and has since become one of the most prominent voices documenting conditions inside California’s women’s prison system.
A transfer policy and its stated safeguards
Under the law that took effect in 2020, California permitted inmates who identify as transgender to request placement in a facility matching their gender identity. Backers framed the change as a safety measure β a way to protect a vulnerable minority from violence in men’s facilities.
Ichikawa argues the reality has been the inverse. She told The Daily Wire that the men who arrived were not the demure, at-risk figures the policy’s supporters described.
“They were advertised as delicate flowers who needed a safe place to do their time, and they sent the exact people that they said they wouldn’t send,” she said. “These are men that are tattooed from head to toe. 33.8 percent are registered sex offenders.”
She stated that officials had pledged transfers would exclude sexual offenders, domestic abusers, and men with long histories of violence against women. “They said: there would be no sex offenders; there would be no woman beaters; there would be no one with a long history of violence against women. And that’s exactly who they sent,” she said.
According to state prison data from 2021 cited by The Daily Wire, 33.8% of the men who requested transfers to women’s prisons in California were registered sex offenders.
Ichikawa emphasized the demographic mismatch. “I can’t think of any worse demographic of people to send into the women’s prison, knowing that 92 percent of that population are survivors of some kind of sexual abuse,” she said. She also claimed that inmates seeking transfer were not required to present as female in any visible way β that a self-declared transgender identity was sufficient.
‘Nothing lower than this’
Ichikawa said she began hearing from women inside the prison when the first busload of transferred men arrived in 2021. What followed, she said, was the installation of condom dispensers in the women’s facilities β a development she described as the state effectively treating sexual activity between male transfers and female inmates as an inevitability rather than a security failure to be prevented.
“When they started to install the condom machines into the women’s prisons after the transfers started, I thought there’s nothing lower than this. Nothing,” she said.
The Daily Wire’s commentary on the episode, written by the outlet’s opinion staff, frames the condom machines as a symbol of what it calls “empathy myopia” β a term drawn from the work of psychologist Paul Bloom, describing a cognitive bias in which intense empathy for a small, visible group crowds out concern for the broader consequences borne by others.
Whether or not one accepts that framing, Ichikawa’s account raises a straightforward question: if the state determined that the transferred inmates presented no risk, why distribute contraception inside the facility at all? The presence of the machines, critics argue, is itself an admission that officials anticipated sexual contact between male and female inmates.
Questions about scrutiny from the left
The commentary notes a perceived asymmetry in advocacy. Last week, it observes, prominent voices rallied to the defense of a woman identified as “Jane Doe,” who alleged she was gang raped by seven Cornell students, with commentators demanding the harshest possible consequences for the accused. In that case, the outlet reports, the available evidence β including the woman’s own sworn statements β contradicted her rape claim.
The piece argues that feminists and progressive commentators have been largely silent about women locked in cells with male transfers who arrived against the inmates’ will, and who cannot leave. It also points to a broader pattern of what it describes as selective outrage: indifference toward women attacked on trails by people in the country illegally, toward children rescued from trafficking operations, toward female athletes confronted by male bodies in locker rooms, and toward victims of repeat offenders released under liberal criminal-justice policies.
Part of the explanation, the commentary suggests, may be psychological. Bloom’s research describes a narrow spotlight of empathy that illuminates one person or cause while leaving everyone else in darkness, and psychologist Paul Slovic’s work on “psychic numbing” holds that compassion diminishes as the number of victims grows. A single sympathetic plaintiff can mobilize a movement; a large, diffuse population of harmed women can produce numbness instead.
Another possible explanation, the piece allows, is less charitable: that the compassion on display is performative β virtue signaling calibrated for social media rather than a conviction that survives contact with inconvenient facts.
What happens next
California’s transfer policy remains in effect, and it has been replicated in some form in other states. For Ichikawa, the women she speaks with are not abstractions in a policy debate. They are, in her account, a population in which the overwhelming majority have already survived sexual violence, now housed alongside men the state once promised would never be sent to them.
Asked what she would say to those who dismiss such concerns as bigotry, Ichikawa’s answer, as relayed by The Daily Wire, is simply the record of what happened after the buses arrived β and the vending machines that followed.
Source: www.dailywire.com β https://www.dailywire.com/news/vending-machine-compassion-why-the-left-ignores-the-victims-it-creates