Despite a growing public understanding that a lack of filtering means any man can declare “I am a woman” and be backed up by a state punishment apparatus dedicated toward justifying his every wrongdoing while marketing him as the victim, certain New York lawmakers seem dead set on letting trapped women bear the brunt of their abuse and expecting the rest of us not to care.

The so-called “gender identity respect, dignity, and safety act,” A5478A in the Assembly and S1049 in the Senate, has moved into committee in the Assembly. Please contact your New York State Assembly Members and urge them to vote no on this bill. In addition, if your assembly member is a co-sponsor of this bill, urge him or her to withdraw sponsorship. (A list of co-sponsors is included at the end of this Call to Action.)

The bill requires that if any incarcerated individual declares a “gender identity,” they get special treatment. They must be placed according to their self-declared “gender identity” over sex by default, and are required to have access to commissary items “consistent with [their] gender identity,” whatever that means. Read the bill text here for the full statement.

Our concerns are not mere speculation. Women’s rights advocates predicted that letting any man declare himself to be a woman would let male rapists and predators abuse the system, and that is indeed what has happened. A former female prisoner has already sued the City of New York after a male prisoner claiming to be a woman raped her. A male prisoner, Ramel Blount, was sentenced to seven years for raping a women in the Rose M. Singer Center at Rikers, which is supposed to be female only. We have seen men identify as “transgender” after being incarcerated. We have seen the mainstream media ignore when men attack women in the Rose M. Singer Center.

For more complete coverage of this issue, see our MYTH vs. FACT: Women’s Prisons page.

It’s going to take a lot of political pressure to get lawmakers to drop this issue. They have been shuttled into a belief system that encourages them to pretend words have no meaning, from the hotly contested “woman” to a favored label, “marginalized.” They seem to have no idea that the individuals who are “marginalized” are the women who keep being beaten and raped by male prisoners while being explained to that the larger, stronger men who get special privileges are the real victims. If they think ignoring attacks on incarcerated women is virtuous, what values do they actually stand by? If they’re lying about this, what else are they lying about?

They need to learn that spinning a narrative that they care isn’t enough; they have to actually care, and that means not ignoring their constituents when they draw attention to a major human rights issue.

Spread this far and wide. The sooner they realize the public isn’t buying their excuses anymore, the sooner we can end this madness.

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Call to Action!

1. Find your New York State Assembly member here.

2. Check if they are a co-sponsor. We’ve listed them all here. If so, include the bracketed parts in the message below, but remove the brackets. If not, you can take the bracketed part out.

Note that Zohran Mamdani is listed as a co-sponsor on the website (in keeping with his other anti-woman policies in this vein), but there is currently no one representing New York’s 36th State Assembly district.

Nily Rozic	Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas
Jo Anne Simon	Harvey Epstein
Harry B. Bronson	David Weprin
Anna Kelles	Rebecca Seawright
Chantel Jackson	Chris Burdick
Deborah Glick	Phara Souffrant Forrest
Donna Lupardo	Catalina Cruz
Eddie Gibbs	Alex Bores
Linda Rosenthal	Tony Simone
Steven Raga	Maritza Davila
Karines Reyes	MaryJane Shimsky
Manny De Los Santos	Sarahana Shrestha
Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn	Al Taylor
Dana Levenberg	Grace Lee
Andrew Hevesi	Jeffrey Dinowitz
Yudelka Tapia	Gabriella Romero
Phil Steck	Demond Meeks

3. Click the ‘Visit Assemblymember’s Page’ button.

Then click the Contact button at the top of the screen.

We’ve crafted a message for you to start with, but feel free to personalize it with whatever you want! If you’re a lifelong Democratic voter, feminist, etc., please say so. It makes it harder to pretend a defense of women’s rights is “far right” every time we speak out.

Dear Assembly Member [Name],


I am writing as your constituent to urge you in the strongest possible terms [to withdraw your co-sponsorship for Assembly Bill A5478A, and] to vote NO on A5478A every time it is reintroduced.
 
If A5478A becomes law, it will further reinforce the human rights violations New York State has enabled by rolling back single-sex intimate spaces intended to protect women. We already know, from jurisdictions like New York City that have passed similar laws and ordinances, that this will result in female prisoners being subjected not only to violations of their dignity and privacy, but also to sexual abuse and rape.

Several such incidents have already happened in Rikers, as well as in jails and prisons across the country, so this is not mere speculation.

Female prisoners are already vulnerable. Many have been victims of sexual abuse. To house these at-risk women with males, no matter how the males identify, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Moreover, failure to separate inmates on the basis of sex violates “The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules),” which requires the separation of prisoners by sex.
 
I therefore strongly urge you [to withdraw your sponsorship and] to vote NO on A5478A. 

Sincerely,
[YOUR NAME]