Conservative IWF Now Replacing “Women’s Sports” With “Women’s Prisons”

Whenever conservatives claim to advocate for women the only item on their agenda is attacking trans women’s rights.

Opinion, by Evan Urquhart

The Independent Women’s Forum has announced a new “docu-series” on women in prison, specifically to push absurd and misleading claims that the greatest threat incarcerated women face is the fact that a tiny number of trans women are housed with them. (This is demonstrably untrue. Also, most trans women are still held in male facilities. Also, trans women are at higher risk in prison than any other group of incarcerated people.)

The IWF’s Kelsey Bolar told Fox News that the group, which has deeply conservative politics, had produced the docs out of a "desire to take a stance in this fight and be a voice for current and former female inmates who, sadly, don't have a voice." Well. Isn’t that… special.

A quick perusal of the IWF’s website shows that the group, whose signature issues include opposing “gender ideology” in schools and opposing trans women’s participation in women’s sports, has only very occasionally discussed prisons before. For instance, in 2019 they published an essay objecting to comments by Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who once called for “prison abolition” before walking her statements back and clarifying she meant prison reform. In response the IWF’s Charlotte Hayes wrote, “it is a dangerous folly to assume that [people] are in prison because of society’s ills and not their own actions.”

In 2020, the IWF’s Charlotte Whelan (a second Charlotte!) also tackled the issue of prisons by passionately defending for-profit private prisons, which have been criticized for their higher rates of assaults and statistically poorer records on safety and security as compared to state and federally administered prisons. Whelan’s contribution to the discussion of private prisons was to visit one and describe how great it was, without mentioning the federal investigations and national reporting that had found abuse, neglect, and mistreatment in many of the private prisons Whelan did not decide to personally pay a visit to.

In addition to occasional defenses of prisons the IWF has strong conservative positions on crime. One typical example can be found in a 2023 interview with Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, whose introduction calls out soft-on-crime decarceration policies as endangering Americans.

screenshot from the IWF website

According to Mangual, from the interview, “there’s certainly been a massive increase in crime, particularly serious violent crime, shootings and homicides.” In reality, 2023 saw a dramatic decrease in crime, including violent crime.

Overall, the IWF stance is clearly in favor of putting more Americans, including women, in prisons, particularly for-profit ones. This conservative, tough-on-crime, private prison apologist group presenting themselves as a voice for incarcerated women, or any incarcerated people, anywhere, is a cruel joke.

By presenting themselves as a “voice” for women in prison, and using that voice to attack trans women rather than advocate for better conditions, more rehabilitation, fewer predatory fines and fees for poor women caught up in the prison system, and less use of prison overall, IWF is running the same con job they’ve run on women’s sports, cynically adopting the language of women’s rights for purposes at odds to the interests of the women they claim they’re speaking for. Part of the motive is to attack trans women, sure, but it would be naive to imagine that’s the only goal. Instead, by co-opting some empty language of compassion and concern for incarcerated women,, they’re actively undermining actual efforts to reform incarceration in the U. S., which imprisons people than any other country in the world.

This is almost perfectly analogous to how false claims that anti-trans activism is rooted in concern for women’s sports has been used as a mask for conservatives to attack cis women’s strength and athletic skill. The aim is to prop up the systemic violence that leads to massively more incarcerated women in America than almost anywhere else, to keep women down, both cis and trans, not lift them up.