When considering the title question, it’s important to point out that we don’t have exact figures for how many gender-bending prisoners have actually been transferred to female facilities. But if you’re talking about Wisconsin, the commonality being observed is that slightly more than half of all prisoners who self-identify as transgender women are behind bars – at least in part – because they were convicted of sex crimes. Our colleague Madeline Leesman at Townhall breaks down the numbers and the trends are beyond disturbing. She analyzed some material assembled by The Heritage Foundation and found that 50.3 percent of “transgender women” in the state’s prisons had been convicted of one or more counts found on a long list of sex crimes. And the number of those crimes that involved children was simply shocking.

Just over half of the men who identify as “transgender women” who are imprisoned in Wisconsin have committed at least one count of sexual assault, according to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

According to the documents, 161 men who believe they are women are housed in Wisconsin’s prisons. Eighty-one of them (50.3 percent) have been convicted “of at least one count of sexual assault or sexual abuse.”

Included in this list are the following crimes: Sexual Assault of a Child, Sexual Exploitation of a Child, Trafficking of a Child, Bestiality, Rape, Sexual Intercourse Without Consent, Forced Viewing of a Sexual Act, and many others.

One problem with the data, as noted above, is that the Wisconsin Department of Corrections refuses to say whether they are housing transgender prisoners in women’s facilities and, if so, how many. Thanks to recent lefty trends in the state, they apparently don’t draw that sort of distinction because they’ve bought into the “trans women are women” chanting craze. But we know it’s been happening elsewhere for a while, so it wouldn’t come as any sort of surprise.

If you don’t follow the subject closely, Madeline takes us for a bit of a stroll down memory lane. A convicted trans murderer in California had been found guilty of murdering a lesbian couple and their son. California sent him to a women’s prison because he “identifies” as a female now. (Because of course they did.) And before you could say Bob’s your uncle, he was accused of repeatedly preying on women in the prison.

Then there was Demi Minor in New Jersey. The trans convict was one of hundreds of men claiming to be women who were sent to female prisons in the Garden State. Minor wound up impregnating two actual female prisoners at the facility and admitted to the deeds. (It’s just amazing how women can suddenly get other women pregnant after all these millennia, isn’t it?) His own mother told reporters she thought her son was a psychopath.

The point is, you can take those stories and others like them and put them in context with the statistics from Wisconsin cited at the top. If for some reason (and we’re sure it’s all just a big coincidence), a significant number of the self-identified “transgender women” who are convicted of crimes have demonstrated a particular propensity toward sex crimes, isn’t locking them up in a facility full of women who have no ability to escape them just about the worst idea possible?

And yet, somehow that’s what we seem to keep doing. A couple of years ago, at a prison in Illinois, a female prisoner was raped by a trans prisoner who was transferred into the facility. When she complained to the staff about it, she was pressured into dropping the charges and then they turned around and hit her with a charge of filing a false complaint. I understand that all of these people are in prison for a reason, but that doesn’t mean that the inmates need to be subjected to this.

Why do we keep doing this? Are we supposed to feel apologetic about locking up a convicted male sex offender with other men just because he now claims to be a woman? I’m afraid my cup of sympathy is running a bit dry at the moment. And yet outlets like CNN continue to complain that the “real problem” is that when you put “transgender women” in male prisons, they might be sexually assaulted there themselves. Here’s a suggestion. If you find yourself being sent to a men’s prison, dress like a dude and keep your mouth shut. Life will probably be a bit easier that way.