Every few years, a new moral panic rolls through Australia’s media cycle. Lately, it’s trans women in prison. Across talkback radio, conservative women’s groups, and columns written by commentators and carceral feminists who have never stepped foot inside a women’s prison, suddenly everyone is deeply invested in the “safety of incarcerated women”. The outrage is loud, rehearsed, and oddly selective.
Let’s be honest: these people have never cared about us before.
Conservative commentators who have been silent through decades of violence against criminalised women now want to position themselves as our defenders, not because they’ve had a change of heart, but because we’ve become useful. Women in prison are being used as weapons in a broader campaign of transphobia, our suffering leveraged not to protect us but to punish someone else.
It is grotesque political theatre, and those of us who have lived inside know exactly what it looks like.
Conservative politicians, select women’s groups and carceral feminists now professing concern for “women’s safety in prison” are the same groups who have never shown up for the most urgent, devastating crises facing us.
Where were they when Aboriginal women, who make up the fastest-growing prison population in the country, were killed in custody?
Where were they when women were subjected to degrading strip searches, sometimes multiple times a day?
Where were they when mothers were denied contact with their children, or forced to say goodbye to their babies in hospital before being returned to prison?
Where were they when prisons became so overcrowded that women slept on floors, when bail laws filled cells with women who are racialised, poor, disabled, fleeing violence, or homeless?
Where were they when women were punished for being victim-survivors themselves, arrested after calling police for help, charged for defending themselves, criminalised for the harm done to us?
When rape and sexual assault were perpetrated by prison officers? When private phone calls home to children cost more than the women earn in so called prison industries? When employment, education, and post-release housing was nearly impossible to access?
Silence. Every time.
Suddenly, they care? No, suddenly, we are useful.
Journalists like Peta Credlin now paint themselves as champions of incarcerated women, despite having never once lifted their voice for us in any of the ways we need her to. Her columns have never condemned the strip searching of girls, the solitary confinement of traumatised women, or the brutalisation of disabled and neurodivergent women behind bars.
But let a trans woman enter the frame? Suddenly, she is an advocate.
This isn’t feminism. It’s opportunism. It’s anti-trans politics dressed up as concern for our wellbeing. The loudest voices claiming to “defend” us are the same voices who have actively supported, or been silent during, the policies that fill prisons with abused, poor, and marginalised women in the first place.
Let’s also be clear: the article by Credlin sanctimoniously accusing the South Australian Premier of hypocrisy is rich coming from someone who has never once defended us on any other issue. For decades, organisations led by criminalised women have been fighting to expose the violence, neglect, and state abuse inside women’s prisons. Credlin wasn’t there. Women’s Forum Australia wasn’t there. None of these carceral feminist groups were there.
But they are here now, because we have become useful props in their war against trans people.
You do not get to invoke us only when it suits your transphobia
Women in prison are not political tools. We are not ideological shields. We are human beings who have been systematically ignored, abused, and silenced by the very people now claiming to care about our safety.
If carceral feminists genuinely cared about us, they would be fighting for:
- an end to strip searches,
- safe and meaningful visits with our kids,
- free phone calls home,
- protection from violence inflicted by prison officers,
- the reversal of punitive bail laws,
- access to healthcare, education and employment,
- stable housing on release,
- and an end to the criminalisation of survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
But they are nowhere to be found on these issues.
Their silence tells the truth: their interest is not women’s safety; it is punishing trans women.
Let’s listen to the women who actually know what prison is like
Many people weighing in on this debate have never before this moment spoken to an incarcerated woman. They have never sat across a visiting table from a mother weeping because she has lost her children. They have never witnessed the humiliation of a strip search or the terror of being locked in a cell with an abusive officer on shift. They have never heard the stories of women assaulted by the very system claiming to keep them safe.
And yet suddenly they are experts on our wellbeing.
If they truly want to talk about safety inside women’s prisons, then here is the invitation:
Come speak with us at the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Come speak with the women currently inside. Come speak with the formerly incarcerated women who have survived these institutions. Ask us what we are afraid of. Ask us what harms us.
You will hear about prison itself, not trans women, as the source of violence.
The real threats are the ones these groups refuse to name
The biggest dangers women in prison face are not the trans women serving time alongside us. The biggest dangers are:
- prison officers who abuse their power,
- policies that deprive women of dignity and connection,
- strip searches that amount to sexual assault,
- solitary confinement recognised internationally as torture,
- racism, ableism, poverty, and the state violence that cages women in the first place.
These are the harms that kill us, traumatise us, and destroy our families. Not the women who are already marginalised, already vulnerable, and already targeted, including trans women.
If you want to defend women, start with the truth
Women in prison deserve safety. We deserve dignity. We deserve our voices to be heard, not appropriated and co-opted, and we deserve better than being used as pawns in someone else’s discriminatory agenda.
If conservative commentators or carceral feminist’s want to defend women in prison, they can start by defending all women in prison, not only the ones who fit their narrative.
Start by fighting for us when we are strip-searched.
Fight for us when we are killed in custody.
Fight for us when we are denied our children.
Fight for us when we are priced out of phone contact with family.
Fight for us when state violence is committed against us.
Fight for us when we are punished for surviving domestic violence.
Fight for us when we come home and no one will hire or house us.
Otherwise, stop pretending this is about us.
We see what this is really about, and we refuse to be your weapons.