A small anti-trans group that joined a lawsuit challenging a California law that protects incarcerated trans people is a new nonprofit that united forces with four imprisoned cisgender women.
The Los Angeles-based group, Woman II Woman, is one of the parties behind a federal lawsuit seeking to declare gay state Senator Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 132 unconstitutional under both the state and federal constitutions. Members discussed their aims and reasons during a virtual event December 15. Woman II Woman is a nonprofit by formerly incarcerated women.
As the Bay Area Reporter previously reported, four women who are incarcerated filed the lawsuit in United States District Court for the Eastern District of California in Fresno against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation November 17.
The text of the complaint has anti-transgender undercurrents as it refers to trans women as men.
SB 132 was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020 and went into effect in January 2021. Authored by Wiener (D-San Francisco), it allows incarcerated transgender people to ask for a transfer to a state prison or detention center that matches their gender identity. But as the B.A.R. reported in November, less than two-dozen such inmates had been transferred at that point out of the nearly three hundred who had requested to be moved.
The law requires that the CDCR record each individual’s self-reported gender identity, gender pronouns, and honorifics. It also requires…
