Spain’s ‘Angel of Death’ Transferred to Women’s Prison Under Self-ID Law

Last month, the Spanish serial killer known as ‘the Angel of Death’ was moved into the women’s section of Puig de les Basses prison in Figueres, Spain. Joan Vila Dilmé is serving a 127-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2014 of eleven nursing home murders carried out between August 2009 and October 2010. Dilmé, dubbed the most prolific Spanish serial killer this century, now identifies as a woman and will be imprisoned in a facility that matches his “gender identity.”

Dilmé is not the first such case. Last year, a trans-identifying man accused of stabbing a 27-year-old to death in Reus was incarcerated in the women’s module of the Mas d’Enric penitentiary in Tarragona. As Reduxx reported on April 21, Pedro Jiménez García, a “violent criminal with an extensive record of sexual offenses has reportedly begun the process of ‘transitioning’ to ‘female’ while serving a 93-year sentence for the sadistic murder of two female police trainees.” He may soon be entitled to a transfer to a women’s prison.

These serial killers are taking advantage of Spain’s sweeping and revolutionary ‘Trans Law,’ which bears the clumsily Orwellian title “Law for the Real and Effective Equality of Trans People and for the Guarantee of the Rights of LGBTI People,” passed by Parliament in February 2023. According to that law, people can simply ‘identify’ as the opposite sex and change their legal documentation with an application to the Civil Registry and a single personal appearance.

Once this process is completed, confirmation of a new gender identity arrives after three months—nothing else required—for anyone over the age of 16. Previously, legally changing sex on formal documents had required an official gender dysphoria diagnosis and two years of medical treatment. In one fell swoop, Spain became one of the most trans-captured countries; although twelve European countries have ‘self-identification’ laws, only Malta and Iceland compare for permissiveness.

Prison officials have obediently followed the ‘Trans Law’ in both principle and in practice. Male inmates can request transfers simply by declaring that their gender identity no longer matches their birth sex—no ‘transition’ treatments required (although some prisoners request hormone therapy to hurry requests along). Once inmates have their gender ‘updated’ by the Civil Registry, the process of transfer can begin. In fact, the Catalonian prison system began to facilitate self-ID transfers in 2020. 

Feminist activists and social conservatives predicted the brutal consequences of self-ID. Men guilty of horrific crimes against women in Spain are frequently attempting to identify as women in order to mitigate the consequences. A Basque police officer who tried to kill his wife in front of their two young daughters in 2024 legally changed his gender to female. A man who killed a 45-year-old woman in Es Fortí after a night of drinking with his girlfriend in 2015 was transferred to a women’s prison in 2024 after identifying as ‘transgender.’ 

It’s not difficult to see why these criminals want to get transferred. In 2023, a trans-identifying male inmate impregnated a female inmate in a women’s prison in Alicante. For obvious reasons, there is very little public data on just how many trans-identifying men have been moved into women’s facilities since the Trans Law came into effect; the most recent information on state administration prisons (which excludes the Basque Country and Catalonia) puts the number at between 22 and26. It is likely much higher now.

In some instances, self-ID laws are even being used by abusers to get access to their victims. Spain’s Councillor of Family, Youth, and Social Affairs in Madrid warned in 2024 of multiple cases of men convicted of domestic violence changing their legal gender to female, and in three such cases, male abusers asked to gain access to the very female shelters housing the wives and children who had fled from them; in another truly grotesque case, a sexual assault victim had her official protection removed because her assailant was now a woman.

Spain’s LGBT activists and their political allies have trumpeted the “Trans Law” as a great step forward for equality. None of them asked the fearful and vulnerable women now locked behind bars with the ‘Angel of Death’ or whether they would like to share a cell with a sadistic killer who ended up in jail for the sexual torture of his victims. For LGBT activists, the man who murdered an elderly lady in a nursing home by forcing poison down her throat is more vulnerable than the female prisoner who now lives in the same cell block that he does—because he identifies as a woman. The actual women? They’re on their own.