Libby Emmons: Why Biological Men Are Entering Women’s Prisons Across America and the West
“Federal prisons have been tasked with making sure that they are not transphobic by allowing men who identify as women … into women’s federal prisons.”
Libby Emmons was a playwright and producer in the New York theater community until she faced the ire of both her peers and her audience. Her crime? The views she held on gender ideology.
“The ‘ask’ by these trans activists, which I do not believe includes all trans people, or all gay people, or anything like that—this is an activist ‘ask’, and the ‘ask’ is to erase women. The ‘ask’ is to completely change the language, change our understanding of reality, and to tell us not to believe our eyes, not to believe our senses, but to believe what we are told to believe. This is indoctrination on a mass scale,” says Emmons.
Today, Emmons is the editor-in-chief of The Post Millennial and Human Events, where she writes frequently about cultural trends related to race and gender in America.
“By conflating gender identity and biological sex and then—essentially because you have changed the definitions—rewriting all the laws today that have protections for women, you are changing the entire structure of society, and you’re doing it by not even having to pass any laws. You don’t have to do anything but completely corrupt the language,” Emmons says.
We discuss many of the gender-related changes in society today, including biological males in women’s prisons and on women’s sports teams, “gender-affirming care” for minors, rewriting the definition of “woman,” and how transhumanism and transgender ideology embrace a similar mission.
“The Department of Agriculture took this directive and said, ‘Okay, so we give out a bunch of funding for free student lunches across the country so that kids can eat lunch … If your school has a policy of not allowing gender self-ID for washroom access—for bathroom access—then we will withhold free lunch aid,” says Emmons. “You can’t even quantify how many women commit crimes in Canada because men are included in that number.”
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/libby-emmons-why-biological-men-are-entering-womens-prisons-across-america-and-the-west_5327403.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Libby Emmons, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Libby Emmons: Thanks so much, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with a headline from the publication where you are the chief editor, The Post Millennial. “Protestors demand removal of trans-identified males from New Jersey women’s prison.” Sub-headline, “”The solution to male violence in male prisons is not male violence in women’s prisons. This needs to stop. Get men out!” This is a quote from one of the inmates, presumably. This is an issue that you’ve been covering for quite some time. Let’s dig right into it.
Ms. Emmons: There have been some changes in law, and in the definition of words, that have enabled males who claim to be women to gain access to women’s prisons and to be housed there. Many of these men are violent, and many of these men have committed crimes against women. They find themselves then surrounded by women in prisons that are remarkably less secure, and locked down than the male prisons are.
A man’s prison, men’s maximum security prisons and women’s maximum security prisons have very different levels of security. A women’s maximum security prison is more like a man’s medium security prison. You get a lot more benefits and freedoms, such as they are, than you would in a male prison.
Mr. Jekielek: What you’re suggesting is that there might be some people perhaps looking to game the system.
Ms. Emmons: Any man who has been incarcerated and then decides that he is actually transgender and identifies as a woman, and seeks entry into a women’s prison is a grifter and a fraud. These are not the same men who are trans prior to committing crimes, and ending up in prison. These are men in a lot of cases, who end up locked up, then decide they’re women, and then seek entry into women’s prisons. That happens a lot, as it turns out. I don’t think those men are doing anything other than trying to get a better housing situation for their time in lockup, really.
Mr. Jekielek: Or worse, as this headline would suggest.
Ms. Emmons: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: What exactly is happening in this New Jersey prison?
Ms. Emmons: In New Jersey prisons, men are given access to women’s prisons simply by saying that they are female. There was a man, Demi Minor is his trans name, who impregnated two women, was then removed, and has sought to gain entry back. I’m pretty sure that’s the only women’s prison in New Jersey. The women don’t like it. The women don’t want men in their prisons, for a variety of reasons. Many women who are in prison have suffered domestic violence at the hands of men, and now, here they are subjected to the potential of more male violence.
Having spoken to women who are either currently incarcerated in women’s prisons, or who have been released and had served time in women’s prisons, there are other concerns as well, such as the changing dynamic that happens among women when a man is introduced. You also have a situation in California, where I was talking to one inmate at the Central California Women’s Correctional Facility, who was saying that when a man comes into the women’s estate, oftentimes an eight woman prison cell will be cleared, and the man will be housed there.
This one woman, Tomiekia Johnson, was telling me that one man that was housed there got the eight person prison cell to himself, and then was actually allowed to have a woman in that cell with him, with whom he was enjoying sort of playing house, and they had some kind of relationship. There are additional atrocities and horrors that we can discuss, of what happens to women who are locked in prison with male criminals who claim to be women.
Mr. Jekielek: I definitely want to touch on that. But since you mentioned California, there’s actually a new law signed in by Governor Gavin Newsom, as I understand it.
Ms. Emmons: It was signed into law by Gavin Newsom. It was brought by California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is an absolute and complete menace to California. At one point, I actually talked to New York State Senator Brad Hoylman’s office. The person I spoke with on the phone there revealed to me with pride that Hoylman and Wiener work together to bring similar bills in California and New York, which I think is actually really terrifying, given the conditions in New York.
Wiener brought this bill, and it was signed into law. As soon as it was signed into law inmates in male correctional facilities petitioned to be moved into women’s correctional facilities, 261 trans-identified inmates. Of these there were hardly any trans men, and the trans men’s petitions to be moved into the male prisons were denied, clearly for their own safety. Yet, no one had any concern about the women who were going to be impacted by the men transferring in.
All 261 of those cases have yet seen the man transferred into the women’s prison. But there are increasing numbers, and each case is reviewed., However, even prior to this law being signed into effect, there were men who claimed to be women who were given access to the women’s prisons. In those cases, the man had to have undergone surgery. There was actually a case of a man called Jessica Marie Hann, who after being castrated, ended up being housed in the same prison with the woman who was mother of the two children that he had murdered.
Mr. Jekielek: Unbelievable. How exactly does this relatively new California law change things?
Ms. Emmons: It changes things because now you have women who are at the mercy of these men, yet again. When I talked to Ms. Johnson about it, she said that women were extremely unhappy about it. No one likes this. The California prison system started putting condoms machines in women’s prisons. Being locked up in prison, why would women need condoms?
You only need condoms if you’re going to be subjected to men, and having sex with men. Now, there are men in the prisons, who only have to self ID. I certainly don’t think that the state should be forcefully drugging anyone, but they don’t even have to be taking estrogen. They don’t have to show that their manhood is non-functioning. In fact, their manhood is functioning.
Tomeikia Johnson also told me, and this is something that I have not personally verified, though she did tell me that she spoke with guards. She told me that a woman that she knew did fall pregnant to a man who said he was a woman, in the prison. Then, he beat her mercilessly so that she would miscarry. The miscarried child got buried in the prison yard.
Mr. Jekielek: Unbelievable stories. Does the law say that self ID is basically enough to make that transfer?
Ms. Emmons: Self ID, yes. Self ID is enough. It’s enough to say that you are the opposite sex, to be believed that you are the opposite sex. Self ID, of course, is what is permeating so many of these laws. That’s a huge part of what goes on.
Mr. Jekielek: But the activists for these laws would say, “There were all these trans men in the male prisons, and were in danger. Finally, they can be their true selves in this new place.” I imagine that’s what they would say.
Ms. Emmons: Sure. But that doesn’t change the nature of your biology, and it certainly doesn’t change the impact that a male person can have on a large group of women, many of whom have already suffered abuse at the hands of men. It’s just inhumane to think that one man’s feeling that he is unsafe in a prison means that he needs to create a situation where hundreds of other women are completely unsafe. Why is his need so much greater? In England, they decided to create separate sections for trans inmates, because they were finding that there was trouble.
There have been rapes all through the system; New Jersey, Washington state, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, and in England. We’ve seen this all across the board. Obviously, not all men perpetrate violence against women. But why do we now have this feeling that men who have been locked up are now all of a sudden not going to perpetrate violent crimes against women, even though that’s what they have been convicted of?
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a recent disclosure that James O’Keefe made about male inmates, exactly this situation. In the recording there is a discussion of gaming the system by getting someone pregnant, getting them to sue the correctional system, and thereby getting a million dollar baby. Have you heard about anything like this?
Ms. Emmons: I’ve heard about this just like you, with the James O’Keefe story. Certainly, gaming the system is something that’s going to be on the minds of criminals who have been working to game the system for whoever knows how long. There were rapes in Washington state prisons. Dori Monson, who was a radio talk show host in Washington state, had covered that. He recently died, I believe. He had covered that a while back, but nobody wanted to believe it, and nobody wanted to discuss it.
There could be a lawsuit that would maybe say, “This woman was victimized because this man was let into the prison and raped her.” That would show the fallacy of this law. What if California were to suffer some result where they had to pay out a million dollars, admit their guilt and admit their complicity in the rape of women where they are literally locked up? They can’t leave, and they can’t go anywhere else.
When they complain about men being in women’s prisons and say, “There’s these men around,” they are told that they are bigots. They are told that they are transphobic, and that they are the problem. You are gaslighting these women, you’re further traumatizing these women, and California certainly should be held liable.
Mr. Jekielek: How long has this been going on?
Ms. Emmons: In California, this has been going on since 2021. But we also have a situation where it’s very hard to tell how long it’s been going on, in somewhere like Canada. Heather Mason, who was incarcerated for a time, has come out of prison and has spoken out against men being incarcerated along with women. But in Canada, they did this totally insane thing, where they said that men who identify as women, are now counted as women. They said, “We’re going to take this new definition of woman, and we’re going to apply it to our statistics.”
In Canada, in statistics for crime, you will see statistics of women raping women. Those women are actually men, but their crimes are now part of this statistical database of women’s crimes. You can’t even look at the data and get an accurate understanding of what has been going on, because the lies are embedded in the system. They are embedded into the system. They changed the definition of woman, and then they changed the statistics recording data to match that lie. So, you can’t tell. How long have men been in women’s prisons? No one knows, because the government tells you that they are women.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s absolutely incredible.
Ms. Emmons: It is absolutely incredible. It’s happening in the U.S. right now. President Biden has been working really hard with his team to change the definition of woman to be anyone who identifies as a woman. Then, he is using this definition and tasking every single federal agency to use this new definition of women as they introduce and implement their policies. He put out a couple of executive orders about this, saying, “Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, I need you to use this new definition of woman. Reassess all of your policies and programs, and make sure that you’re not being biased against men who say that they’re women. Use this new definition.”
By conflating gender identity and biological sex, because you have changed the definitions, you are rewriting all the laws to date that have protections for women. You are changing the entire structure of society, and you’re doing it by not even having to pass any laws. You don’t have to do anything but completely corrupt the language. Federal prisons have been tasked with making sure that they are not transphobic, by allowing men who identify as women into women’s federal prisons. They’re working on that.
The Department of Agriculture took this directive and said, “We give out funding for free student lunches across the country, so that kids can eat lunch.” If their parents don’t have the money for lunch, kids can still eat lunch. They said, “If your school has a policy of not allowing gender self ID for bathroom access, then we will withhold free lunch aid.” That’s what the Department of Agriculture said.
The Department of Health and Human Services, they are doing their own thing to make sure that insurance companies pay for gender transition surgeries. The Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine is a man who underwent gender transition after having his own children, and now advocates for the sterilization of minors through gender-affirming care, as they call it, which is absolutely another bastardization of language.
Levine is out there saying, “Insurance companies must cover what is essentially cosmetic surgery for men who want to appear as women.” But he does not advocate covering for women’s surgery to appear more female, for breast enlargement or whatever it is. In a sense, Biden is boosting boob jobs for men through the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s pushing for boys and girls to be in opposite sex bathrooms in schools.
We saw what happened in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a trans-identified student raped a girl in a bathroom, and then the school board covered it up, at length. That turned into such a giant headache, for not just that school district, but for the entire country. In 2021, the father of the girl who was raped in the bathroom went to a school board meeting. He said, “My daughter was raped in the bathroom by this trans student, and you guys didn’t do anything about it.” This was the same school board meeting where a gym teacher was coming under fire for not wanting to use the preferred pronouns of students.
This father showing up at the school board meeting, led directly over a period of time, to the Department of Justice instructing the FBI to investigate parents with the same tools that they use to investigate domestic extremism, if those parents complain at school board meetings about anything from masking to, apparently, their daughters being raped in the bathroom.
The Department of Education is using Biden’s brand new definitions for women that include men, to insist that males are permitted to play on women’s sports teams, and threatening to withhold funding from any academic institution that doesn’t allow that. Title IX was put into place to make sure that women had equal opportunities to compete in sports, and now, Title IX is being used directly to deprive women of the right to compete on an equal playing field in athletic competition in schools.
It’s absolutely insane. It’s just absolutely insane. It starts with the most minuscule little thing, which is asking compassion for those who feel differently about themselves. Women were asked to be compassionate for trans-identified males, “Let them say that they are women. That’s all they’re asking for. They just want to be recognized as women.” We have taken that little tiny kernel—calling a man a woman—and we have turned it into removing protections for women in the workplace, removing protections for women in prisons, and removing protections for children not to undergo medical sex changes as minors. We are taking away free lunches. We are taking away all of these things from women, who just had that one little ask. “Be compassionate, just say that the men are women. That’s all we’re asking.”
No. That’s not all they’re asking. The ask by these trans activists, which I do not believe includes all trans people or gay people, is an activist ask— and the ask is to erase women. The ask is to completely change the language, and change our understanding of reality. The ask is to tell us not to believe our eyes, not to believe our senses, but to believe what we are told to believe. This is an indoctrination on a mass scale, and it’s absolutely horrifying.
We saw this happening so far back in the arts. I was involved in the arts, and it was somewhere around 2007 when I started seeing this. Because when you’re in the arts, you ask for money. You put in for grants, and you say, “I want to do this project, please give me money to do it.” A lot of times the foundations want to give money to their own pet causes. You would put in a grant proposal for a project, and you would say, “I am a woman artist. Please give me money because I am a woman artist, and I’m writing about women.” The proposals said, “Must be a woman artist.” Then, they started to change and started saying, “Must be a woman, or woman-identified artist.”
I was someone who was making their money off grants, and I had funded my entire maternity leave off grant money. I remember looking at this and saying, “What is woman-identified? Does that mean men? Am I now competing for women’s grant money alongside men, just like I’m competing alongside men for the bulk of the other grant proposals?”
What is the difference now, except that that man who says he’s a woman is a much special-er woman, then just your basic woman? I was just born this way, but now he identifies as a woman, and this is special and new. I was concerned that this kind of thing might eventually happen. I spoke out about it to my friends who were also in the arts, and they would say things like, “I can see how that’s logical, but that’s crazy.” At the time, I would speak about this to my other liberal friends. Everyone would say, “This is crazy.” Now, here we are, in Congress, they took away the word mother. They replaced it with parent and birthing person.
You had Cori Bush, a congresswoman from Missouri who rose to prominence during BLM, Michael Brown in St. Louis, and that whole situation. She literally went to Congress to give her testimony about her difficulty birthing her children, as a mother. What happened to her in the medical system.
Cori Bush: I am committed to doing the absolute most to protect black mothers, to protect black babies, to protect black birthing people, and to save lives.
Ms. Emmons: What we have done to mothers is taken away their language to identify themselves, because somehow saying that you’re mother is offensive to someone who is not. It’s absolutely insane. It began with the destruction of language, and here we are. You can’t even quantify how many women commit crimes in Canada, because men are included in that number.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re talking about discovering that this new terminology appeared around 2007 in the arts scene, and you became up in arms about it. A few things happened after that, you becoming the chief editor for The Post Millennial and Human Events. There was some cancellation along the way, correct?
Ms. Emmons: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me the story. What happened to you?
Ms. Emmons: Yes, I was writing plays. I was producing plays in downtown New York, which is really the only downtown in the universe as far as I’m concerned. We were producing plays downtown. My friends and I were in residence at a poetry club, Bowery Poetry Club, which was great. It actually closed in 2012. I wrote a play called, “How to Sell Your Gang Rape Baby for Parts,” and it was very much about all this stuff.
The play was about two HR professionals. My friend and I played those characters. All of the action happened off-stage, it was just the two of us. We had a trans boss, and we had an intern who had been raped by a football team and was now pregnant, and the insurance didn’t cover an abortion, so the boss was fundraising for the abortion. There was just all of this stuff. One of the characters decided that they wanted to get female genderization surgery, which is where you become even more female. You get all of the accoutrements that you might get as a trans-identified male who’s undergoing this stuff.
Anyway, it was very satirical, it was very dark, and audiences would either crack up laughing because they understood that it was a joke, or they would just gasp in horror. But I did not really feel like this was doing enough. A lot of people couldn’t tell who I was sending up. Was I sending up the Left, or was I sending up the Right? Who was I critiquing in this?
I started doing some research into transhumanism, which is a fascinating concept. I wrote this piece for Quillette, which I had heard about from podcasts with Jordan Peterson. It was about the undercurrents of transhumanism in Western culture, which I identified as transgender ideology, and AI human integration, such as Neuralink, and also body hacking, which is like where you could put RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] chips in your hands, and open your garage door.
The story went pretty viral. With the people in the theater community it took about six months before anyone noticed that I had written this, which was fine with me. I just kept doing my work. But eventually, the theater community got wind of this, decided that I was transphobic, and I essentially lost my audience. No one was going to come see my plays, once it was determined that I was transphobic.
In fact, once when I started to go to other plays, people that I knew would just ignore me entirely. My friends that I was doing a theater project with said, “Maybe if you apologize, we can still do our project. Maybe if you apologize to the non-binary lesbians who are angry because you think trans people are weird future robot people. Maybe if you apologize, we’ll be okay.”
I said, “You guys, I’ll never do that. You know me better than that.” My theater company closed. We had a nice beautiful space to produce this musical that we were working on. We lost the grant, because the theater company closed, and the women didn’t want to work on the project anymore. I said, “Listen, just take the project. I’ll leave the company. You guys just work on the project.” They were like, “No, it’s your project. Everyone knows it’s your project, so we can’t just do it.”
They were angry with me, and we’re no longer friends. Some of the women I was friends with for a very long time, going back to college. I don’t know what they’re doing now. I’ve given this a lot of thought, since this happened in October 2018. At first, I was very angry with them, but I think that to a certain extent they were right. We had no company if we had no audience, and no one was going to come see a show that I was involved in.
I know that they agreed with me, though, that men aren’t women. They know that fully. None of these women were in their 20s. They all know very clearly that being a man is not being a woman. It’s a totally different thing. I do wonder if we could have stayed friends. I reached out to them over a period of weeks saying, “I think we could do this, guys. It doesn’t have to be like this.” I got no response, so I just decided to stop writing artwork, and start writing a lot more directly about these issues, which I did.
Mr. Jekielek: I vaguely recall the piece that you’re talking about now. I don’t remember there being anything against trans people.
Ms. Emmons: Yes. If you say you have nothing against trans people, that’s just more evidence of your transphobia. As a producer of plays, I produced the work of trans playwrights. I produced plays about trans issues, and gender, and identity, and all of that stuff. Because for me, if it was well written, if it told the story well, if it was compelling, I was interested in producing it. I wasn’t interested in your identity. I wasn’t interested in the identity of your characters. I was interested in producing artwork that made you feel something.
Over a period of the following year, I would get emails from people who said, “We no longer need your play for this project,” or, “We’re giving you the rights back for your play and we’re not going to produce it.” I had one instance where someone reached out to me and said, “Would you like to be in this project?” I said, “Yes, thank you so much. I would love to be involved in this project.” I thought, “Oh, it’s over. It’s over. It’s okay now.” But no, they realized instantly that that was the wrong thing to do, and they never contacted me again.
There were certainly some artists who either didn’t know, or didn’t care, and I worked with them for a while. But it was pretty clear that there wasn’t going to be space for me on a stage with audiences who would come, once they knew who I was and what had happened, and what the story was. So, I gave it up. I gave up theater.
Mr. Jekielek: Talking about trans in minors and in the schools is not just academic for you, you have a son.
Ms. Emmons: I have a son, he is 13-years-old.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s right. There is a policy in a lot of schools that now this is something that should be kept secret from parents. I’ve been discovering lately that this is much more common than I realized.
Ms. Emmons: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know if you were even thinking about this back then, but obviously you were in the midst of realizing what this whole activist movement was.
Ms. Emmons: Yes. In 2016, the American School Counselors Association sent out a directive to schools saying that you could be causing harm to students by telling the parents that counselors are having this gender identity conversation in school. Essentially, the idea is that parents are likely to be so abusive that you will be harming students by telling their parents what’s going on with them at school. This is absolutely insane, and part of why it’s insane is because of the way language has been used to completely bastardize the entire conversation.
First of all, gender identity doesn’t mean anything. Everyone is gender-nonconforming. Everyone has things about themselves, or their desires, or their interests, that do not specifically align with the stereotypical understanding of male and female. Of course, we all do. I played with mud pies, and my cousin played with dolls. They were wrestling dolls, but they were still dolls.
When you consider it like that, if you are female, your body is female. That’s just how it is. It’s a biological condition, and yes, there’s stuff that goes along with that. Every woman is more or less involved with that. You think of Dr. Deborah Soh, who speaks about her understanding that she was exposed to more testosterone in the womb, and this is perhaps why she has sometimes more masculine interests. She’s still very much female. That’s just obvious. It’s very clear. It doesn’t matter that perhaps she has more masculine interests, that doesn’t make her less female.
That’s part of it too. They say to a little boy, “You like to wear a dress, that means you’re a girl.” Probably what it means is the little boy is not feeling more comfortable with a gender identity, but it has something to do with the way his skin feels or the way that air moves in those clothes. There’s no big deal about that, and that’s a perfectly fine thing. Kids are just weird.
I remember when my son was little and he would have something he would want to do. I would say, “Okay, but what’s your weird kid reason?” He would say, “Because I just wanted to go pick up that leaf.” I replied, “Okay, that’s not a good reason to run in front of the truck, so just hang on. We can get you the leaf.” They’re not actually suicidal, because they’re aiming to run in front of the truck. They are just trying to pick up a leaf.
Mr. Jekielek: Kids come up with all sorts of things.