BC's Gender Identity Crime: Allowing Men in Women's Prisons
Where trans-identified males are perceived as the most vulnerable and women are collateral damage.
Inside Alouette Correctional Centre for Women.
I have been helping to cover a survey by Women’s Declaration International (BC/Yukon) sent to BC political candidates ahead of the October 19th election. One of the questions concerned the candidates’ stance on including trans-identified men in women’s correctional centres. I’d like to explore this more here as WDI and I argue that men should not be housed in specifically female institutions. I explore some of the provincial cases over the past 10 years, why this experiment has been a failure, and why we should push to put an end to this practice for the sake of women’s safety and dignity.
In 2015 Jaris Lovado was transferred from a provincial correctional facility, Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre, to Alouette Correctional Centre for Women. This was the first time that an intact male had been transferred solely on the basis of gender identity. According to someone who worked at the Kamloops centre at the time, Lovado seemed like a fairly typical guy before he was transferred. During his time at Alouette, according to this former Kamloops employee, Jaris impregnated several women. Lovado (or Bianca Sawyer as he became known) was released from Alouette and put on probation, however by 2016 he had been remanded again and placed in the Surrey Pretrial Services Centre, a men’s facility.
Lovado brought a human rights complaint against BC Corrections, however the Ministry of Justice defended the decision to have him placed in the men’s facility, stating that “Lovado engaged in inappropriate relationships with female inmates and posed a safety risk to women who may have experienced trauma.” After the complaint had been made however, Lovado was transferred to back to Alouette, once he signed a behaviour agreement. He was released from Alouette a few months later. He returned to custody a short while later and was taken directly to Alouette.
Despite the eventual transfer back to Alouette, what happened with Lovado was a plot twist. When Lovado’s transfer from Alouette occurred in 2015, Suzanne Anton, the Minister of Justice at the time was quoted in Global News saying of the new gender identity-based transfer policy, “It will be a very progressive policy. It will allow people to be placed according to their gender identity.” Well, I don’t think it worked out very well. BC Corrections had to fight, albeit unsuccessfully, to keep women at Alouette safe from Lovado who was clearly a heterosexual male keen on engaging in sexual relationships while incarcerated.
The Human Rights Tribunal was used to bludgeon the common-sense approach of BC Corrections, which rightly saw the harm caused by this inmate, into accepting the fantasy identity of Lovado. The Ministry of Justice even presented evidence of Lovado having stated he was male to a probation office between sentences. This was disregarded by the tribunal.
Similar attitudes towards potential harms of women by the tribunal are noted in other cases. Makayla Sandve, who was sentenced in 2017 and held at the Surrey Pretrial Services Centre, made a complaint about a range of discrimination he was alleged to have experienced, including not being transferred to Alouette. When BC Corrections defended this decision by stating that Sandve had an extensive criminal history (which could pose a risk to the women in Alouette), the tribunal responded, “To infer, without evidence, that Ms. Sandve should be treated as a male dangerous to female inmates engages in questionable biological determinism”. This is quite astonishing given that, presumably, there is a general understanding that there is a purpose to separating male from female inmates in separate institutions. The tribunal also stated that prisons are inherently dangerous places. This is confusing if the tribunal doesn’t believe in “biological determinism” as it suggests that even if Sandve had a negative impact on women’s safety, this doesn’t really matter because prisons are dangerous anyway.
In the case of Kevin (Hayden) Patterson, after initially being held in Alouette with a behaviour contract (e.g., not allowed to share a cell, no sexual touching or communication), he was sent to Surrey Pretrail Services Centre after a violent incident. Patterson submitted a case to the BC Supreme Court to be transferred back to Alouette or to the Okanagan Correctional Centre. The supreme court denied the request but did instruct BC Corrections to reconsider the decision to transfer Patterson.
BC was the second province, after Ontario, to allow for the transfer of men into women’s prisons based solely on identity. This occurred under what was BC’s more conservative party, the BC Liberals (unrelated to the federal liberal party) led by Christy Clark. Before that, according to Surrey Pretrial Services Centre Standard Operating Procedures from 2013, “Transsexuals who have not progressed beyond step 3 in the process, set out in section 9.17.2, are placed in a correctional centre consistent with their original gender.” Step 3 was sex reassignment surgery. The same procedures refreshingly state that “Transsexuals are individuals genetically of one gender with a psychological urge to belong to the other gender.” The overwhelming ideological practice of defining trans-identified men as women had not yet pushed its way into governmental procedures.
The increasingly dogmatic policies and decisions placing trans-identified men in women’s prisons in BC has indisputably caused harm to women:
Women are used by these men to validate and reinforce their supposed womanhood.
They are being treated as expendable non-entities by the BC Human Rights Tribunal. Their decisions suggest that women are less deserving of safe environments than trans-identified men.
Women are physically being put in harm’s way.
Men are disrupting the inmate community by engaged inappropriately with women.
Placing trans-identified men in women’s prison is the end of the line for harmful gender identity ideology and policy. Once you are putting men, who have been widely understood to generally be more violent, more sexually aggressive, and stronger; into facilities full of women where ensuring safety is challenging at the best of times, it appears that regard for women is nearly inexistent. At a federal level, a report by the Correctional Service of Canada of inmates between 2017 and 2020 showed that 86% of trans-identified offenders were sentenced for violent crimes. A different review in 2019 (by way of an article by Eva Kurilova) shows that 50% of trans-identified men in the federal system were sentenced for sexual offenses, 30% higher than the general population.
Prison transfers are barely reported on, and when they are, women don’t figure in the story. They tend to be congratulatory of supposed progressive policies. On the Lovado case, Global News went straight to Morgane Oger, a well-known trans activist (and man) in Vancouver for a comment which of course did not mention women at all. For all the talk of trans women, using feminine pronouns for these men in court and tribunal decisions, and accommodating supposed womanly needs, the female inmates are completely forgotten about and pushed aside by policy and decision makers.
We need to make sure that the women are forgotten no longer and that this becomes an issue that the provincial and federal governments of Canada are forced to face head on.
Thank you!
Excellent article on a very important topic. It's time to put common sense back into our institutions, including prisons. Protecting women's safety and privacy should be top priority.