In 2008, while Amie Ichikawa was serving her sentence at the Central California Women’s Facility for armed kidnapping, assault, and drug possession, she heard about a disturbing new arrival.
The prisoner’s name was Richard Masbruch. Masbruch had been convicted of raping one woman and torturing another. After castrating himself in prison and changing his name, Masbruch had convinced the state prison board to transfer into the women’s prison.
Such a move had never happened before in California, so the news was almost too outrageous for Ichikawa’s family to believe.
“I kept calling home, and I was saying, ‘Hey, there’s a rapist here. There’s a man here,’” Ichikawa said. “And my parents were like, ‘Wow, are you on drugs? What’s wrong with you?’”
Back then, incarcerated women like Ichikawa saw the problem as straightforward: Men don’t belong in women’s prisons, so the state should keep them out.
By the time she completed her sentence and launched a ministry dedicated to supporting women in prison, the problem of men in women’s spaces had swelled into a much bigger political issue, with California allowing prisoners to request transfers out of male prisons into women’s facilities.
Female inmates, their families, and legal advocates worry that male prisoners adopt a transgender identity just to get access to the women’s facilities, where they can threaten women’s safety and disrupt the rehabilitation process. For the state, the dilemma becomes how to keep those women safe while also protecting male prisoners whose gender dysphoria puts them at risk among the male prison population.
With advocacy groups staking staunch positions on either side, Ichikawa’s nonprofit Woman II Woman and evangelical allies in California are speaking out for what they see as common-sense reform to keep men from transferring into women’s prisons.
“Everything is prioritized over incarcerated women’s mental health and physical wellbeing,” according to the leaders of Woman II Woman. “We believe everyone should be treated with respect, agency and dignity, and that one community’s safety cannot come at the cost of another’s.”
The Trump administration has boosted their position. When he took office in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring men from single-sex spaces designated for women, including prisons. But that order was quickly challenged by lawsuits and may take months to sort out, leading the administration to try another tactic to get states to comply.
Earlier this month, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the administration would pull federal funding from the Maine Department of Corrections because the state was housing a male inmate in a women’s prison. Bondi said Minnesota and California would be next.
California began housing prisoners according to self-reported gender identity five years ago, after passing Senate Bill 132.
The new law came into effect just as Ichikawa launched Woman II Woman, which advocates for the safety and dignity of women in prison and teaches, “The only way to complete rehabilitation from a lifestyle that led to incarceration is through a relationship with … Jesus Christ.”
Ichikawa had served time for a crime she committed back in her 20s, when she hung out with drug dealers and dated a gang member. She and her boyfriend kidnapped a woman who owed her money, and they held her at gunpoint. Armed kidnapping typically carries a life sentence in California, but Ichikawa struck a deal for five years in prison and an instant two strikes on her record. One more felony, and she’ll get life.
In prison, she was a self-centered “user of Jesus,” as she put it, leaning on God to get her through the sentence but not reconsidering her life choices. When she was released, she said she went back to her old life, “living very selfishly, doing my own thing, not any dependency on the Lord.”
Over the years, her faith deepened, and she prayed for an opportunity to use her experience to help more women in the correctional system. After founding Woman II Woman, Ichikawa kept hearing from inmates—she said it felt like “20 calls a day”—asking how rapists and sex offenders had gotten approval for transfers to the women’s prison.
Such moves aggravated the trauma that many women carry with them to prison. More than 70 percent of incarcerated women report experiencing threats, violence, and abuse at the hands of former partners.
Two women Ichikawa spoke with sought transfers once they learned that their ex-boyfriends, who were also incarcerated, had begun identifying as women and were moving over to the same facility as them. One woman told Ichikawa that the last time she saw her ex, he said, “Next time I see you, I will kill you.” She managed to transfer out the same week her ex showed up.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has received 885 requests seeking transfers to women’s prisons. The department has approved 45 such transfers, and 211 more applications are currently pending.
In all, over 2,000 people in California prisons identify as transgender, non-binary, or intersex, and around 1 in 7 prisoners at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla—one of the largest women’s prisons in the country—are listed as male.
At CCWF, prisoners who transferred from male facilities eat in the same dining halls as women, take the same classes, shower in the same bathrooms, and spend the night in the same eight-person cells—each roughly the size of a two-car garage.
In that confined space, one of those transfers, Tremaine Carroll, allegedly raped an incarcerated woman within three days of arriving at the prison in 2024. Others in the prison told me Carroll abused, raped, or impregnated multiple women. I wrote to Carroll, who admitted to fathering a child with a female prisoner but denies it was rape.
Carroll is now back at a men’s facility. Since 2021, officials order three prisoners who transferred to women’s facilities to return to their previous institutions.
Joanna Gomez, who is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder at CCWF, told me Carroll raped her roommate. “Most of the dudes get away with more than us females,” Gomez said. Sexual abuse and fights happen after 9:15 p.m., when cells are locked up for the night. “During first watch, aka graveyard shift, there’s no one coming to our rescue,” she said.
Multiple female prisoners at CCWF told CT that transfers from the male prison even ended up with better cell assignments or fewer roommates after they assaulted, bullied, and attacked women.
“It boggles my mind that these men have all their anatomy and can still live in the same room with us,” said Michelle, a prisoner at CCWF who asked to withhold her last name for fear of retribution.
Many prisoners revile the new inmates, but others revert back to patterns of trauma they experienced prior to incarceration. “Some of the women here are so broken … they seek solace in the comfort of these men,” Michelle said.
The state says it does not track incidents of sexual violence broken out by gender identity, but a 2022 affidavit filed by the Women’s Liberation Front detailed at least 17 incidents where transfers physically or sexually harassed women or engaged in lewd behavior in the first year alone.
Woman II Woman wants to see reform so women don’t continue to face such threats.
“Women’s involvement in the justice system is largely tied to their experiences of male violence,” the ministry states. “A humane justice system must recognize the unique needs of our community and ensure that we are not housed in situations that are triggers for us and completely detrimental to our rehabilitation, mental health and well being.”
Ichikawa has gotten to know as many people involved in this issue as she could—women spending life in prison for murder, prisoners who were convicted of sex crimes as men but now live in women’s prisons, prisoners who identify as transgender women in both facilities, and men in all-male facilities. She believes men and women, regardless of their criminal backgrounds and even past sexual offenses, are “being done a great disservice” by the prison system under such policies.
She speaks regularly with Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, who was incarcerated at a men’s prison in California and sought treatment for gender dysphoria. After surviving a gang rape and contracting Hepatitis C, Norsworthy sued and won a transfer to a women’s facility. There, Norsworthy finished serving time and was released on good behavior.
Ichikawa believes Norsworthy was truly victimized and wasn’t safe in a men’s prison. Back in 2015, Norsworthy successfully sued and won the right for California to pay for sex reassignment surgery, setting a precedent for other inmates to have the state cover hormone and surgical treatments. But Norsworthy is suing the state again, this time for complications from the surgeries.
Though an advocate for transgender rights, Norsworthy also recognizes how the loophole has allowed men to manipulate the system. “I am sick and tired of having more power and right to be a woman than a woman who was born a woman,” Norsworthy told the media outlet Reduxx.
Ichikawa texts with Carroll, who was accused of raping female inmates and fathering at least one child while housed in a women’s prison. Carroll denied the rape allegations and told CT that “those that had actual dislike for me were those that had romantic interests in me that I didn’t reciprocate.”
She also hears from men in men’s prisons, many of whom do not think it was a good idea for men to get access to women’s prisons.
According to California’s latest official population count, 250 inmates are listed as male and 1,701 as female at CCWF. According to the corrections department, workers verify gender data with an official document such as a driver’s license, birth certificate, or passport. Unlike most states, California does not require a doctor’s note for residents change the sex on their birth certificates, and prisoners in California also don’t need proof of medical intervention to transfer to a prison for those of the opposite sex.
Ichikawa says there’s little chance of overturning the original California law that allows for housing transfers based on self-identified gender. And challenges to Trump’s executive order have left people hoping for a change at an impasse. So Ichikawa proposed a compromise.
At the end of March, Woman II Woman cosponsored California Senate Bill 311, which would designate a separate unit within both of the state’s women’s prisons just for transgender inmates. They could eat meals and attend classes with the rest of the prison population, but they would have to live and sleep apart. This would limit the potential for abuse after evening lockup and afford women more privacy.
Legislators agreed to give the bill a hearing in Sacramento this week.
Ichikawa admits she isn’t sold on this in-between solution and worries the bill will not get support from either women’s rights or transgender rights groups. The female inmates, for their part, said it’s a concession they’ll be okay living with. And Christian advocacy groups in California agreed.
“Is it ideal? No. But they’re finally acknowledging this is a problem,” said Greg Burt, vice president of the California Family Council.
Gary Cass, an elder at Christ Community Church in San Diego and a Christian radio host, said he’s hopeful that the proposal will finally generate a rational conversation on the issue, even if the bill likely won’t pass.
Both Burt and Cass foresee California’s prisons developing separate units for transgender prisoners in both the men’s and women’s facilities.
Most incarcerated men and women just want to serve their sentences, be rehabilitated, and be freed, said Ichikawa, but all that is lost if men and women are housed together. Men will pose a threat. Women won’t be able to heal from abuse. And the prisoners who experience gender dysphoria won’t fit in either space, especially if they struggle with lust, trauma, or both. All need a path forward.
