NT Chief Minister Takes Aim at Trans Women Inmates: Interview with Justice Not Jails Tony Sinni

Northern Territory chief minister Lia Finocchiaro has again been sowing social division, as when appearing on Mix 1049 to speak with host Katie Woolf on Monday 13 October 2025, the Country Liberal leader clarified that transgender women shouldn’t be held in male facilities, because “at the end of the day, if you are born a bloke, you are going to a men’s prison”.

Finocchiaro made the comments in response to a question about a national scare campaign around trans inmates, led by Women’s Forum Australia. The stir was caused by CEO Rachael Wong, who wrote to the PM and state and territory leaders calling out the practice of detaining trans women in women’s prisons, citing a 2019 sexual assault in a South Australian women’s facility as reason.

The NT’s top minister said she’d received the letter and moved quickly to confirm matters with NT corrections, so she could “attest to all Territorians” that if they were “born a gender that is the prison” they go in. She added that NT “women’s prisons are women-only, trans people are not part of these prisons and a new women’s prison in Mparntwe-Alice Springs will strengthen this resolve.

Finocchiaro outlined that the policy of the government was already to place transgender women in men’s facilities, and the pair mocked the idea that holding transgender individuals in facilities matching their identified gender is best practice, and the Country Liberal leader further suggested that the social engineering involved in all of this is the domain of the Australian Labor Party.

Sowing social discord

Social justice organisation Justice Not Jails has condemned the statements of Finocchiaro aiming to promote “division and harm toward trans people both incarcerated and in the community”, which is certainly in line with the Country Liberal government’s agenda over the last 14 months, as it’s comprised of a law-and-order drive against First Nations people, ultimately, to lock them up.

NT antidiscrimination commissioner Jeswynn Yogaratnam expressed “serious concerns about recent public comments made by the chief minister Lia Finocchiaro regarding banning of transgender women in women’s prisons”.  The lawyer added that the statements were alarmist and risked “inflaming prejudice and hostility toward trans Territorians”.

Five Sistergirls, or transgender First Nations persons, currently being held in Holtze Correctional Facility, which situated on Larrakia land about 30 kilometres from Garramilla-Darwin, recently wrote to the government regarding their ill treatment in the male facility, where they maintain they’ve been subjected to ongoing transphobia and racism from prison staff.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers spoke to Justice Not Jails spokesperson Tony Sinni about what they consider the chief minister is trying to achieve by referring to transgender women as “blokes”, how these recent divisive remarks also helped facilitate legislative reforms that served to water down NT antidiscrimination law and how the minister only appears to be concerned with her small coterie.

Women’s Forum Australia and the Murdoch press appear to be stirring up a moral panic around transgender women being placed in women’s prisons, which is not always the case around the country or in the Northern Territory

In response, Finocchiaro last week referred to local trans women and Sistergirls as “blokes” and thought it necessary, in light recent articles in The Australian, to assure constituents that transgender women are being imprisoned in male facilities.

Tony, how are we to understand that this “crisis” suddenly fell out of the sky? And what do you think about the comments that the NT chief minister has made about transgender individuals and the NT policy relating to their imprisonment?

This crisis is an absolute farce. It is completely manufactured. It didn’t just fall out of the sky. What is clear is this is an example of the chief minister picking up this hook from some down-south lobby group, the Women’s Forum, and using it to punch down against a small population of trans people in custody and manufacturing an alleged crisis.

This is clearly a distraction from the chief minister’s failures around keeping people, in particular women, safe in the Northern Territory.

In regard to the chief minister’s comments, they’re further evidence that she seeks to punch down.

The comments were disgusting, and she knows that. This is not a chief minister that seeks to appeal to a broad group: she actually seeks to appeal to a particular small group.

Finocchiaro runs an oligarchy up here in the Northern Territory. Her comments about the policy that relates to approximately one percent of the Northern Territory population, is just another example of her trying to distract from the fact that she is failing the Territory in many ways, and she is failing to the keep the Territory safe.

The chief minister and the radio host’s assertions about “blokes” being locked up in women’s prisoners are sensationalist on a number of levels, not least in terms of what the actual situation is like on the ground in the Territory in respect of transgender inmates.

Can you dispel some of the myths Finocchiaro has been attempting to propagate?

Firstly, trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans women are not blokes.

The second thing is there are no trans persons in custody in the Northern Territory who have been placed in a women’s prison. The truth is trans women have the right to be accommodated safely in the NT. That is the truth under the law.

What those accommodations looks like in practice is trans women being put into solitary confinement in a male prison, when they identity as trans women, because they don’t feel comfortable or safe to be accommodated with the other male prisoners, due to the discrimination, humiliation and degradation that they face.

The next thing that is important to know is that trans women in custody, in particular, are the inmates that are the most unsafe. We know that from accounts from trans women in custody in the Northern Territory.

They’ve said that they’ve been stripped of their right to be women, or the personality of their womanhood.

This is coming directly from corrections staff. The corrections staff are employed by the Northern Territory government, so they come under the antidiscrimination law, as they’re employed in an area where they should not be discriminating against trans people, as it is against the law.

Trans people should be protected in their womanhood, in their manhood, in their transness, while they are in the care of a government program.

What we know is that corrections are refusing to allow trans women to shave their facial hair or to wear wigs, and they are also being directly transphobic towards these women. This is a breach of the law.

The circumstances in prison are clearly different to the myths the chief minister is trying to propagate. She is trying to deflect from the fact that she is putting all women in custody, including trans women, in harm’s way.

So, the NT chief minister is talking about a policy that doesn’t need to be reformed? 

Yes. In fact, what we know is the latest October 2024 policy that this government is allegedly relying on, is actually just an update of the 2021 policy.

So, this means the chief minister has come out and dog whistled about this to get some political points from her lobbyists down south, and despite the fact that Finocchiaro thinks she is leading the country, she is in fact leading the country backwards.

She has not made any changes to the policy, even the 2024 one that they had claimed to, as it was just an updated version of the 2021 policy, which does require them to safely accommodate trans women in custody.

Finocchiaro mocked the idea of imprisoning transgender people in facilities that cater for the gender that they identify as being in line with human rights standards. The top minister further ridiculed long-sought-after state and territory laws that permit people to change the gender marker on their primary identification documents via self-identification.

What do right standards stipulate in regard to transgender prisoners? Why has there been a shift towards self-identification?

As I said before, the Anti-Discrimination Act in the Territory and at the federal level are very clear, they prohibit discrimination against a person due to their gender identity, and they impose a duty of care on the Northern Territory government to accommodate the special needs of those who are transgender.

So, incarcerating trans women in male facilities without extra protection could actually amount to unlawful discrimination and a breach of the Northern Territory government’s duty. This is what the Northern Territory’s antidiscrimination minister Jeswynn Yogaratnam has said.

These are the rights that are nationally and globally recognised. These are not matters of triviality.

In relation to the shift to self-identification, the point is that the reality of the situation for trans people in custody, is it was never 100 percent reliant on self-identification.

What it meant was that the discretion of the manager of the facility to use self-identification as one determining factor as to how to accommodate the special needs of trans women in custody.

The reason why self-identification is important in itself is that gender identity is extremely personal, and this idea that you need particular body parts to be a particular gender is an extremely archaic view on what it means to have a gender identity outside the classic binary standpoints.

When we start looking at body parts directing what gender we are then we start to open up this strange kettle of fish about what it means to alter your body and what that then means for your gender.

It is a real double standard when you look at what cis people do when they alter their bodies. There are probably those in government who have been to Turkey to get a hair transplant to have their gender affirmed.

This idea that what body modifications you have and how well you choose to express your gender based on how you present it is completely archaic.

The only requirement for being trans, as far as the trans community is concerned, is how you identify.

Finocchiaro is taking aim not just at transgender women, but she’s also targeting Sistergirls in particular. Sistergirls and Brotherboys are transgender First Peoples.

Sistergirls and Brotherboys were around pre-invasion, which would suggest that the chief minister is messing around in an aspect of culture that she has no real understanding of or right to be interfering with or commenting on.

The understanding is that transgender people were part of First Nations ways of life on this continent pre-invasion and this is also the case in other Indigenous communities the world over.

Can you speak about the source of transphobic sentiment being a colonial import?

I can speak to it to a limited extent. It is pretty clear from my conversations with First Nations people in the Northern Territory, with some leaders like Crystal Love, who is the matriarch of all trans people in the Northern Territory. She is a Tiwi woman.

Crystal Love said Sistergirls and Brotherboys have always been here, and they have had an important role in First Nations communities because they can speak to both men’s and women’s business, and they have had a long-standing historical role.

Using the lived experienced and ancient knowledge of leaders like Crystal, it is pretty clear that you can say that transphobia is a colonial import.

Transphobia and all levels of racism are colonial imports. Eighty eight percent of the adult prisoner population in the NT is made up of First Nations people. So, proportionately, it is fairly accurate to say that almost all of the trans people in Northern Territory custody are First Nations people.

So, this is not just a direct attack on trans people, as it is rather clearly an attack on First Nations people. And as we know from everything the Finocchiaro government is doing, they are trying to attack First Nations people every day.

Transphobia is just the next chapter in this agenda.

And lastly, Tony, how do you understand the Country Liberal Party is going to move ahead on this issue? And what is Justice Not Jails planning to do if Finocchiaro and other ministers continue with their divisive culture war agenda?

What was clear from her comments last week was the chief minister was once again trying to use this as an example to inflame and cause division and hatred towards a particular community, whilst at the same time as she was also ramming through amendments to the Anti-Discrimination Act.

Those amendments to the Act passed last Thursday. They served to strip away rights for all Territorians. This is what the chief minister does, she fabricates an issue with no evidence and uses it as an opportunity to ram through an agenda or law reform that strips away the rights of everybody.

The second part of this is that despite the chief minister purporting that her concerns are about trans inmates relate to the safety of women, her track record reveals she’s continuing to cause the greatest harm to women in the Territory.

The greatest threat to women in the Northern Territory is the government and the chief minister. We know that because we have a women’s prison in Alice Springs, and there are around 900 women there without any air conditioning.

We know there are pregnant women being denied care after reporting stomach pains in the watchhouse. We know there is menstrual blood staining the floor as people weren’t allowed to have a shower.

We know that an 11-year-old girl was held overnight in a watchhouse, where lights are on 24 hours a day.

This government doesn’t care about properly investing in the safety of women, because if they did, they would invest in the Northern Territory’s domestic violence sector. There are rising rates of domestic violence in the Northern Territory.

So, in terms of what the chief minister is trying to do, she isn’t trying to cater to the masses because, as far as she is concerned, the only people that matter in the Northern Territory are her small group of elite mates. That is what we know from her policies.

So, Finocchiaro will continue to do that. But Justice Not Jails is going to continue to call her out. We are going to continue to show up. We are only growing. We just celebrated our one-year formation in response to the CLP government.

Justice Not Jails membership has grown and it is continuing to grow. We are continuing to show up, and people are listening at the national level.

Our message to the NT chief minister, is we are not going anywhere. There are a lot of people we speak for in the Northern Territory, and we are not going to go away so long as the Northern Territory’s chief minister continues to cause further harm and violence and places the safety of Territorians every single day at great risk.