Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R) signed a bill into law this week that bans male inmates from entering women’s restrooms, changing rooms and sleeping quarters in state correctional facilities.
The final passage of the bill comes as President Donald Trump’s administration wages war on state laws that allow transgender-identifying men to access women’s spaces in state prisons and schools.
“States have a duty to protect the privacy and safety of women and girls. Letting men intrude into women’s intimate spaces is a denial of the real biological differences between the two sexes and has devastating effects on women,” Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Sara Beth Nolan said. “SB 418 ensures that women’s intimate spaces in correctional facilities are protected for women.”
“ADF commends Sen. Julie Daniels, Rep. Toni Hasenbeck, and the Oklahoma Legislature for their leadership on this bill, and Gov. Stitt for signing it into law. In no world should women be forced to sacrifice their privacy and safety to activists pushing gender ideology,” Nolan continued.
Female correctional facilities have been increasingly allowing male inmates into female prisons if the men claim to identify as women. Trump passed an executive order on his first day in office, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, that banned men from being detained or housed in women’s prisons and detention centers.
Numerous transgender-identifying male inmates have sued the Trump administration since. Gender activists argue that trans-identifying inmates deserve to be placed in facilities that correspond with their gender identity, but others, including many female inmates, say that biological men exploit systems to prey on women.
In California, for example, a 2022 report found that 33 percent of male inmates seeking to transfer to a female prison, in order to correspond with their preferred gender identity, were registered sex offenders. Incarcerated females have been raped and impregnated by trans-identifying male prisoners and report feeling threatened by violent male prisoners.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has doubled down on Trump’s executive order, and has promised to revoke nonessential federal funding from female prisons that house males.
“We will pull your funding, we will protect women in prison, we will protect women in sports, we will protect women throughout this country,” Bondi said in April.