Massachusetts officials are refusing to say how many biological male inmates are currently housed at MCI-Framingham, the state's only state-run prison for women, even as women's rights activists demand the facility remove transgender prisoners entirely. The Massachusetts Department of Correction has confirmed only that the facility is designated for female offenders, declining to state a specific number despite repeated requests.
The fight centers on a 2018 Massachusetts law that allows prisoners whose gender identity differs from their biological sex to be housed, and addressed, consistently with their gender identity, according to the Boston Herald. The same law extends to access to commissary items, clothing, programming, and personal property aligned with an inmate's gender identity, and it permits an inmate to be searched by an officer who shares that gender identity when a strip search or visual cavity inspection is required. The statute does allow exceptions when an official certifies in writing that a placement would threaten an inmate's health or safety or create management or security problems, though the complete text of Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 127, Section 32A was not independently reviewed for this article. The Massachusetts Department of Correction says its transgender-inmate policy is defined by that 2018 law together with a federal court ruling.
That court ruling traces back to Katheena Nevia Soneeya, who was convicted in 1982, while identified as Kenneth Hunt, of murdering two women and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, according to court records reviewed via CourtListener. DOC physicians diagnosed Soneeya with gender dysphoria in 1990 after a failed self-castration attempt. Soneeya later argued the department had violated constitutional rights to medical care and hormone treatment, and in 2024 won a federal ruling permitting transfer to MCI-Framingham, which the court opinion identifies as the Massachusetts facility designated to house female inmates, as a predicate to providing further treatment. The court ultimately concluded the DOC had violated Soneeya's Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment by failing to provide treatment consistent with expert recommendations.
Advocacy Group Cites Unverified Tally, DOC Won't Confirm
Women's Declaration International USA has said at least 18 biological male inmates are serving sentences at MCI-Framingham, an advocacy-network figure the Massachusetts Department of Correction has not confirmed. Holly Stewart, the group's president, also oversees notourcrimes.info, a public database tracking criminal records and incarceration statuses of transgender-identifying males in U.S. correctional facilities. Per the database's 2026 quarterly update, 489 men identifying as women had been incarcerated in the United States at some point, and 44 percent of those men began identifying as women only after arrest or conviction. Stewart has said public awareness is critical to protecting women's rights to safety, and that greater public knowledge could prompt demands for honesty in public records and political accountability.
Christy Hammer, co-director of New England Women's Solidarity, has said female inmates report that nearly all the men housed alongside them remain sexually intact and that the women fear for their safety. Hammer has said the effort to remove transgender prisoners from MCI-Framingham is pro-women, not anti-trans, cautioning that opposition to the abuse of incarcerated women should not be mislabeled as hostility toward transgender people. She has also said that sharing intimate facilities with males risks retraumatizing female inmates, a concern she ties to data from the National Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center finding that 86 percent of incarcerated women are survivors of sexual violence.
A Sentenced Sex Offender's Case Raises the Stakes
The debate has sharpened around the case of Charlese Horton, a Level 3 sex offender sentenced in June 2025 to 25 to 35 years in prison followed by five years of probation. Horton, 47, pleaded guilty in 2000 to sexual assault and kidnapping of a child under 14 and registered as a Level 3 sex offender following that conviction, according to the Boston Herald. Horton kidnapped a victim at gunpoint in an alley in Dorchester on October 25, 2019, and kidnapped the same victim again at gunpoint on February 7, 2020, at a party on Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, the newspaper reported.
Massachusetts women's rights activists have called for transgender prisoners to be removed from MCI-Framingham entirely, pointing to international standards. The Nelson Mandela Rules call for men and women to be detained in separate institutions, or at minimum in separate premises within the same facility. Women's Declaration International USA and other women have protested the Charlie Baker-era law that allows transgender prisoners to be housed in facilities aligned with their gender identity, framing it as a conflict with those detention standards.
Broader Pattern Cited Beyond Massachusetts
A 2011-2012 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey found that roughly 30 percent of transgender prisoners nationally reported being sexually victimized by inmates or guards, and estimated 3,200 transgender inmates were in state and federal prisons with another 1,700 in local jails, according to The Boston Globe. The Globe also reported that Massachusetts's move to transfer a transgender inmate to MCI-Framingham preceded a widely publicized decision by the Illinois Department of Corrections in December to transfer another transgender inmate from an all-male prison to a women's correctional center.
Commentary published by The Hill states that more than 51 percent of male inmates housed with women nationwide are serving sentences for sexual crimes, and that Illinois, California, New York, Washington, and New Jersey have each already documented alleged rapes connected to housing female prisoners alongside males identifying as transgender. The same piece notes that the Massachusetts Department of Correction has not responded to requests for comment. Separately, City Journal has reported that MCI-Framingham houses at least 11 trans-identified men, though that outlet said the facility did not return its own request for comment, and the current total at the facility has not been independently verified through an official DOC roster.
The Massachusetts Department of Correction has said MCI-Framingham is for female offenders but has not stated the number of biological male inmates held there, leaving activists like Stewart and Hammer pressing for figures the agency has so far declined to provide.
