WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) tore into Biden administration judicial nominee Sarah Netburn at a recent Capitol Hill hearing for her decision to place a male rapist in a women’s prison because he claimed “transgender” status, saying it demonstrated the current U.S. magistrate judge’s elevation of left-wing ideology above women’s safety and individual rights.
The Daily Caller reports that Cruz asked Netburn, whom President Joe Biden has nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, about the case of “Justine Shelby” (legal name William McClain) a “female-identifying” man who had raped both a nine-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl. Shelby sued the Bureau of Prisons to be placed in women’s prison for his conviction on child pornography charges, and Netburn sided with him in August 2022.
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“This individual, six-foot-two, biologically a man, a minute ago, you said that when this man decided that he was a she, you said this individual was, I wrote it down, ‘sober and entirely a female,’” Cruz said. “That phrase struck me as remarkable, did this individual have male genitalia?”
Netburn answered he did and that she meant Shelby was “hormonally a female.” Cruz was incredulous: “So you took a six-foot-two serial rapist, serial child rapist, with male genitalia, and he said ‘You know, I’d like to be in a women’s prison. And your answer was, ‘That sounds great to me.’”
“The other women in that prison, do they have any rights?” he asked. Cruz said the case “demonstrates that you are willing to subjugate the rights of individuals to satisfy your political ideology.”
“Senator Cruz, I consider the facts presented to me, and I reached a decision,” Netburn responded.
U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) added that Netburn has called the danger male inmates pose to female ones incarcerated with them “overblown,” despite reports of self-professed “transgender” males abusing women in prison.
Societal indulgence of “transgender identity” poses a range of difficulties for the administration of criminal justice, given prisons are segregated by sex.
In recent years, there has been growing concern around the world over placing men who claim to be women in female prison populations, which has proven to be a means of both securing lighter treatment during incarceration and gaining easy access to women to prey upon. Transgender status also has the potential to be exploited to avoid incarceration entirely in some cases, as seen in Wales when a man who identified as a woman received a suspended sentence keeping him out of prison despite physically assaulting two sexual partners within days of each other, on the grounds that he would be “vulnerable” behind bars.
In May 2023, investigative journalist James O’Keefe released an interview with U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons psychologist Dr. Linda Noelle, who says that male and female prisoners “both play the victim card” to obtain “gender reassignment” surgeries at taxpayer expense. “And then they go through [the far-left American Civil Liberties Union], and then the ACLU sues the [U.S. Department of Justice]” when demands for subsidized transition procedures are initially rejected, Noelle told O’Keefe. “And the DOJ, unfortunately, under Merrick Garland, it rolls over. It doesn’t go through the courts, so they just pay people off.”
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In California last summer, male triple murderer David “Dana Rivers” Wakefield began serving his life sentence in a women’s prison. The state has allowed biological males to be housed with female inmates since 2021, which critics have warned puts actual female inmates in serious danger.
Earlier this month, Hector Bravo Ferrel, a U.S. Army Iraq veteran who served the California Department of Corrections for sixteen years, spoke out about his decision to resign in protest of leaders allowing male inmates to exploit so-called “gender-affirming” policies. “They were like kids in the candy store, because they knew they were going from a men’s prison to a females’ prison,” he said.