US — Minnesota. In recent years, class action lawsuits have challenged and the media has raged against Minnesota’s Sex Offender Program in Moose Lake, MN, which houses 4% of Minnesota sex offenders – “sexually dangerous” or “sexual psychopathic” men whom Emily Piper, commissioner of Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, describes as having the “most horrible criminal histories and horrible crimes in their past of any sex offenders in our state.”

While transgender-identified people make up 0.39% of the US population, they are overrepresented in Minnesota’s Sex Offender Program in Moose Lake, MN, where they comprise 1.09% of the 700 sex offenders, nearly triple their proportion of the general population. The ACLU of Minnesota and The Appeal project have sympathetically highlighted this subgroup in the article “The Struggle to be Trans in Minnesota’s Sex Offender Program,” which laments the obstacles encountered by men who believe they are women as they spend what may be the rest of their lives amongst fellow male sexual predators.

David Josef Lovejoy, who identifies as Kendra Michelle Lovejoy

Kendra Michelle Lovejoy, formerly known as David Josef Lovejoy, is a 53-year-old transgender sex offender who was sympathetically profiled in the article. Mr Lovejoy has a rap sheet of violent and sexual criminality that spans about four decades. His conviction include attempted burglary, sexual assault, sexual offender registration violation, battery and disorderly conduct, as well as five felony counts of possessing pornographic work on computer after he downloaded images of grade school-age children performing lewd acts on one another.

Standing out on Mr Lovejoy’s criminal record, which stretches back to 1985, is a 1995 incident in Arizona in which Mr Lovejoy groped the breasts, bare buttocks and genitals of a 16-year-old girl against her will. He was charged with felony sexual abuse, and ultimately pleaded guilty to attempted sexual abuse. He was set free, receiving a suspended sentence and lifetime of probation. In 2001, Mr Lovejoy was charged with felony child abuse in Florida after he beat his infant daughter until he inflicted bruises on her buttocks. He served six months for battery offense. In 2013, he pleaded guilty to second-degree criminal sexual conduct after a four-year-old girl, daughter of his roommate, told a social worker that Mr Lovejoy often touched his genitals and buttocks to her genitals, and hurt her by “touching” it inside her. Other crimes Mr Lovejoy was investigated for but could not be proven involved drugging and raping a woman, tying up and penetrating a woman by force, and sexually abusing his three-year-old stepdaughter.

Now enclosed against his will in the Mooselake, MN sex offender program where there are no children to harm, Mr Lovejoy regularly harms himself, ordering staff to affirm his gender if they do not wish him to continue mutilating his body in various ways, which he refers to as “self-surgery” and “self-orchiectomy.”

40-year-old Bradley Stephen Boone, who now calls himself Mackenzie Paige Boone and identifies as a trans woman, was also interviewed by The Appeal. In it, he discusses his decision to wear culturally feminine clothes to relieve his “anxiety and dysphoric feelings.” A prolific offender, Mr Boone freely confessed to perpetuating 4,000 sex offenses, which usually involved rubbing against clothed children. He was adjudicated guilty in 1998 to two counts of criminal sexual conduct contact in the first degree with a person under 13.

Criminal record of Bradley Stephen Boone

Like the other sex offenders profiled, 44-year-old Jason Hayzlett’s criminal activity began in youth. After reviewing Mr Hayzlett’s journals in January 2017, MSOP medical staff observed that he has retained the mentality that led him to commit sexual offenses: “The contents of these journals lacked any emotional awareness and acknowledgment of cognitive distortions, while sexualizing specific female staff under the premise of him identifying as transgender. I informed Mr Hayzlett of the team’s perspectives that shades of his offending were being observed.”

Tammi-Jo Fritz, a transgender sex offender in MSOP commitment at the St Peter facility, told The Appeal that MSOP staff had denied his request for feminine clothes, under the presumption that he wanted to masturbate to them. “I just want to be the woman I should have been years ago,” he had told staff. While there is a patient named David Joseph Fritz who was placed in civil confinement after offering to pay an 11-year-old boy to pose nude for photographs, kissing the boy and placing his mouth on the boy’s genitals, Women Are Human is unable to verify with certainty that this is the same person as Tami-Jo. This demonstrates the difficulty of allowing people whose criminal proclivities have proven them dangerous to change their name and sex on official documents, and cover it up with laws, policy and social shaming that forbid “deadnaming” (mentioning a previous name that a trans person no longer identifies with). It facilities criminals who would like to hide their crimes.

Horrors of Self-Surgery by Kendra-Michelle Lovejoy, written for UltraViolet, which bills itself a “Queer Insurrection” prison newsletter.

There is a pattern with the transgender offenders profiled, who feel an attitude of entitlement that ignores the personhood of others to center their own whims and desires. Mr Lovejoy, for example, spotlight of The Appeal article, exhibited his sense of entitlement to view bodies of children whom adults compelled to perform lewd acts on each other, to touch the naked bodies of children who excited him, and to use an infant girl’s body as a punching bag to relieve stress when frustrated. He continues to view the female body as an object and womanhood as an identity that he can and is entitled to inhabit at any cost to others. He demands tax payers fund surgical addition of counterfeit feminine parts to his body for his pleasure, or else he will terrorize staff at the treatment facility with self-harming and suicidal behavior, lawsuits and bad publicity with articles he has written for prison newsletters and interviews with the press.

Staff created an individualized treatment plan to address the volatile, self-harming behavior, but Mr Lovejoy says it is not enough, and the ACLU and The Appeal echo and encourage his and the other transgender patients’ antics.

In a world in which 100% of sadistic offenders indexed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime were found by studies on sadism to have narcissistic personality traits and 20% were found to engage in cross-dressing, it seems ludicrous to argue that the narcissistic entitlement of patients in a facility for the sexually dangerous should be allowed to “run the asylum,” and that allowing sexual offenders to indulge their cross-dressing paraphilia will cure them.