Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson reacted Tuesday to a new report from The Daily Signal on the Wisconsin Department of Corrections housing a transgender prisoner, a child rapist, with women.
“Housing biological males in women’s prisons is insane,” Johnson said Tuesday. “Forcing a woman to share a cell with a biological male is even worse.”
“When will America reject these radical left policies destroying our country?” he asked.
The senator was referring to The Daily Signal’s report on Katie McGraw, a woman incarcerated in Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
Recently she began sending distressed messages to her fiance, Raymond Slater II, describing a transgender prisoner named “Mark Campbell” with whom she shares both a cell and a bunk bed. McGraw expressed extreme anxiety as she described her cellmate’s constant masturbating, sexual comments, and aggressive behavior, and she asked her fiance to find out what exactly got Campbell locked up.
Her fiance said he stumbled on The Daily Signal’s September report on Campbell, a man who now identifies as a woman, who raped his own daughter, and is a registered sex offender convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child.
Since Campbell identifies as transgender, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections has housed him in a women’s prison, Taycheedah Correctional Institution, since August 2022.
The Wisconsin DOC has ignored many requests for comment from The Daily Signal on its incarceration of men who identify as women with females. DOC also did not respond to a request for an interview with Campbell.
Court documents allege that Campbell would sexually assault his daughter while her little brother was home and that “her little brother would sometimes come into the room while the sexual assault was occurring.”
Campbell first requested transgender surgery to attempt to become a woman in 2013, according to a Wisconsin outlet, but the DOC denied his request at the time. In 2016 he filed a lawsuit accusing Department of Corrections officials of being indifferent to his medical needs by not allowing him to get so-called sex-change surgery, the publication reported.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that the DOC officials couldn’t have anticipated that denying such a surgery to Campbell would violate his rights.
However, in December 2020, a federal judge ruled that Wisconsin must offer Campbell taxpayer-funded transition surgery and must move him to a women’s prison while awaiting that surgery.
The DOC housed Campbell in men’s prisons until August 2022, according to the inmate locator. In August 2022, authorities moved him to Taycheedah Correctional Institution, which “provides female inmates with a safe and secure environment that is gender-responsive,” according to the prison’s website.
Some of McGraw’s graphic descriptions of Campbell’s masturbation habits indicate that Campbell may have undergone a vaginoplasty, wherein surgeons remove the penis, testicles, and scrotum, rearranging tissue to create a faux vaginal canal and external genitalia.
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