A longtime teacher at Minnesota’s only women’s prison resigned in protest after transgender-identifying male felons moved into the facility under a policy approved by governor Tim Walz and made the female residents fear for their safety.
Just before her tenth anniversary working for the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee, Alicia Beckmann quit this past summer after her experience of having a male offender in her classroom, she told IW Features, a storytelling project of Independent Women’s Forum, in an interview for the mini video series, Cruel and Unusual Punishment.
Beckmann taught high school-equivalency classes tailored to female inmates, many of whom she said endured emotional and sexual abuse from their former male partners. A transgender-identifying male inmate who took her class threatened to fight security staff and later ended up in segregation at the Shakopee prison, Beckmann told IW Features.
She said her female students shared their feelings of being retraumatized by the male arrivals to the facility.
“The women are scared to speak up,” Beckmann told IW Features. “Many women are incarcerated because of the men they spend their time with, and we all have freedom of choice, but I guarantee that probably 75 percent of our population committed a crime because there was violence against them by a man, or they felt coerced into doing something for that man.”
Beckman said she tried to bring her objections to the Minnesota Department of Corrections and representatives of her teachers union, but she received little support and felt like she would face retaliation if she refused to teach the male inmate.
“It’s not that I wanted to refuse education,” she said. “Education is important, and if [the male inmate] was in a male facility or was even in the community where co-ed is normal, I would have zero issues. But we are not a co-ed facility. We are not designed to be a co-ed facility. And there’s a reason for it.”
Like other formerly women-only prisons across the country, the Shakopee prison has opened its doors to many transgender-identifying male inmates. Christina Lusk and Bradley Sirvio were the first male inmates to enter the prison after Lusk filed a 2023 discrimination lawsuit and prevailed.
Represented by the radical left-wing nonprofit Gender Justice, Lusk sued the Minnesota DOC over his treatment while in prison. The settlement allowed him to be housed in the Shakopee facility and receive gender reconstructive surgery. Lusk underwent a taxpayer funded vaginoplasty and breast “revision” procedure.
Under governor Tim Walz, now Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s running mate, the DOC and the Minnesota Department of Education funneled $448,904 to Gender Justice, according to a report by taxpayer watchdog group OpenTheBooks first reported by the New York Post. Walz has been Minnesota’s governor since 2019.
With the settlement, Walz’s DOC agreed to adopt World Professional Association for Transgender Health standards of care for treating gender-confused inmates.
In March, it was revealed that members of WPATH, the leading global medical organization devoted to transgender health care, privately admitted the ethical precariousness of child sex-change interventions. They expressed behind closed doors that hormone therapy and gender surgery are largely experimental and that minors struggle to give informed consent for them.
A year after Lusk’s legal victory, the Walz administration also implemented a radical policy, titled “Management and Placement of Incarcerated People Who Are Transgender, Gender Diverse, Intersex, or Nonbinary,” that allowed at least four more men, including convicted murderers, to transfer to the Shakopee women’s prison based on their self-declared gender identity.
Beckmann said she left the prison because of the DOC disrupting the vulnerable female inmates’ stable environment for recovery and self-improvement by admitting unwanted male inmates. She also said correctional staff didn’t receive “training” or an “explanation” before the male inmates were transferred into female facilities.
“Ninety-nine percent of the staff I talked to [about the presence of male inmates] were just in disbelief,” she said.
Beckmann said she and other Shakopee staffers felt like they had no choice but to ignore the male inmates or face penalties to their jobs and pensions.
The prison is a “very chain of command agency,” Beckmann said, so “not following directives and policies can be seen as not fulfilling job duties or insubordination.”
Beckmann said men in women’s prison is directly contradictory to a key mission of the DOC: rehabilitating offenders so they can be successful upon release.
“Why do we have gender-responsive classes?” she asked. “Why do we say we are going to rehabilitate inmates, but then ‘Hey, we’re going to put a male sex offender who committed violent sexual crimes against females down the hall from you?’”
Asked for comment by IW Features, the DOC said that the development of its transgender housing policy “included a comprehensive analysis of emerging case law from legal actions brought against corrections agencies across the nation.” Additionally, it denied the allegation that correctional staff did not receive training.
“This policy was single-handedly asking my coworkers and me to check our morals at the door and pretend that this was okay,” Beckmann said. “As a teacher, I could no longer offer a safe environment for my students, so I knew I no longer had a choice to stay.”