A dangerous 58-year-old sex offender who now identifies as a woman is demanding to be transferred to a female prison in Nova Scotia. His lawyer is arguing that the criminal – who now goes by “Amanda Joy Cooper” – is unsafe in a men’s prison after his “transition.”
Cooper has been in prison since 2001 for a range of sexual offenses against several women, and prison officials have resisted his requests to be sent to a female prison, noting that his court records emphasize a “risk to reoffend” as well as his “obsessive attachments” to female staff and the fact that he would pose a “very high risk to the safety” of female inmates.
But in Canada, Cooper is now officially recognized as a woman – and a “transgender woman,” no less – which places him firmly in a recognized category of vulnerable people. Cooper, who had sex change surgeries in September 2024 after announcing his gender dysphoria in 2020, is now trying to play the system for all he is worth, claiming that he “fears physical and sexual violence” and that he now stays in his cell as much as possible and has “very little meaningful social interaction.”
One shudders to consider what sort of “meaningful social interactions” Cooper is hoping for in a female prison. Currently, he is at the maximum-security Millhaven Institution near Kingston; the CBC noted that a psychiatrist had identified Cooper’s “sadistic urges” and a judge had noted that Cooper “does not hesitate to use his strength, weight, and size to control his victims.” Cooper has been a violent and vicious predator since his teens.
Cooper’s offending began in early adolescence, sexually assaulting women in the street. It culminated in 1998 when, over the course of several days following release from prison for sex crimes, Cooper grabbed and threatened to rape a 12-year-old girl in a parking lot, and sexually assaulted two women. One of the women, who had parked at a mall, managed to flee her car following a struggle with Cooper, letting out what witnesses later described as a “death cry.” In 2018, shortly after being transferred out of the Special Handling Unit, Cooper sexually assaulted a female prison worker, according to court documents.
When Cooper was first locked up, the transgender craze was nowhere on the horizon. But in 2026, Cooper the male sexual predator can claim to be Cooper the vulnerable woman who fears being a victim of a male sexual predator. Cooper is extraordinary in that he is so violent, sadistic, and dangerous that prison officials have thus far resisted the pressures of the LGBT-captured system to transfer him. The CBC noted that he is one of a small “number of post-operative inmates denied transfer to women’s prison.”
In fact, Corrections Canada has noted that Cooper is “verbally abusive” and banned from speaking to some female staff; that he had been sent to maximum security prison after threatening to “kill or sexually assault female staff”; that his transfer to a female prison would create “fear and apprehension” for female inmates. Their affidavit is crystal clear, aside from their identification of Cooper as a woman:
Overall, CSC believes that the applicant’s gender identity, hormone treatments, and gender affirming surgery have in no way mitigated her risk to reoffend. She denies that the offence cycle that currently exists is accurate, believing that the offence cycle belongs to her dead self. This claim does not show accountability from the offender as she places the blame on her dead identity rather than her current self.
Cooper’s lawyer, Jessica Rose, will attempt to tug on the heartstrings of the court by describing his metamorphosis into a fearful woman named “Amanda Joy.” Amanda has had “her” penis removed, Rose says, and so there is no reason to keep “her” out of a female facility. “Her message to us and her message to the court is, ‘I’m a woman with a vagina in a men’s prison,” Rose said. “You think I’m safe here?” (One wonders if, as a girl, she could have predicted where she would end up in her legal career.)
To a reasonable person possessed of common sense, this is not a difficult case. Such people are rare in Canadian officialdom. “I think it’s complicated,” said Dr. Rosemary Ricciardelli, of Newfoundland’s Memorial University in Newfoundland, who researches transgender policy. “I think it’s really, really complicated, because each human being has rights and we have to adhere and do our best to meet those rights. So meeting one person’s rights can’t compromise another, and vice versa.”
To translate: a male predator with a long list of sexual offences to his name now identifies as a woman, claims to be vulnerable to sexual victimization, and despite a psychiatrist calling him sadistic and a judge noting his likelihood to reoffend, an academic calls his case “really, really complicated.” It really, really isn’t. “Amanda Joy” Cooper is the reductio ad absurdum of Canada’s transgender regime. We’ll soon find out if the courts realize that.
