-
The injustice of transgender inmates forced into men’s prisons
From Daily Life
http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/news-features/the-injustice-of-transgender-inmates-forced-into-mens-prisons-20150406-1mf5md.htmlApril 7, 2015 – Deborah Sontag
Quote:Before she fell on hard times and got into trouble with the law, Ashley Diamond had a wardrobe of wigs named after her favorite divas. “Darling, hand me Aretha” or Mariah or Madonna, she would say to her younger sister when they glammed up to go out on the town.Diamond, 36, had lived openly and outspokenly as a transgender woman since adolescence, much of that time defying the norms in her conservative Southern city.
But on the day she arrived at a Georgia prison intake center in 2012, the deliberate defeminising of Diamond began. Ordered to strip alongside male inmates, she froze but ultimately removed her long hair and the Hannah Montana pajamas in which she had been taken into custody, she said. She hugged her rounded breasts protectively.
Looking back, she said, it seemed an apt rite of initiation into what became three years of degrading and abusive treatment, starting with the state’s denial of the hormones she says she had taken for 17 years. But last week, Diamond, and through her all transgender inmates, won the unexpected support of the Justice Department, which intervened on her behalf in the federal lawsuit she filed against Georgia corrections officials in February.
“During intake, I kept saying, ‘Hello? I’m trans? I’m a woman?”‘ Diamond recounted in a phone conversation from prison a few weeks ago. “But to them I was gay. I was what they called a ‘sissy.’ So finally I was like, ‘OK, I’m a sissy. Do you have a place where sissies can go and be OK?”‘
They did not provide one, she said. A first-time inmate at 33 whose major offense was burglary, Diamond was sent to a series of high security lockups for violent male prisoners. She has been raped at least seven times by inmates, her lawsuit asserts, with a detailed accounting of each.
She has been mocked by prison officials as a “he-she thing” and thrown into solitary confinement for “pretending to be a woman.” She has undergone drastic physical changes without hormones. And, in desperation, she has tried to castrate and to kill herself several times.
“My biggest concern is that she survives to get out of prison, which I worry about every day,” said Stephen Sloan, a counselor who treated her at Baldwin State Prison and whose pleas that Diamond be restarted on hormones were ignored.
In her lawsuit, Diamond asks the court to direct prison officials to provide her hormone therapy, to allow her to express her female identity through “grooming, pronoun use and dress,” and to provide her safer housing.
She also seeks broader changes in policy and practice. And the Justice Department, in its support, declared hormone therapy to be necessary medical care, saying Georgia, and other states, must treat “gender dysphoria” like any other health condition and provide “individual assessment and care.”
Georgia’s Department of Corrections has declined to comment about the case. As a matter of policy, it also denied The New York Times’ request to interview Diamond in person at Georgia State Prison, where she was moved a few weeks ago in apparent retaliation for her lawsuit, she claims. Georgia State had more sexual assaults between 2009 and 2014 than all but one other state prison.
Since her arrival there, Diamond has survived an attempted rape in a stairwell, dealt with inmates exposing themselves and masturbating in front of her and faced relentless sexual coercion, she said last week in an emergency motion seeking an immediate transfer to a safer institution.
Though Diamond believes she is championing a cause larger than herself, she has expressed increasing despair. She sobbed continually during a recent visit from her lawyer, and in the phone interview, she said: “Every day I struggle with trying to stay alive and not wanting to die. Sometimes I think being a martyr would be better than having to live with all this.”
Last year, Diamond smuggled video snippets out of prison, which a friend posted on YouTube. In them, her head wrapped in a white turban, she struck a lighter and more defiant tone, hoping that recent television portrayals of transgender characters might generate concern for her plight.
[video width=425 height=344 type=youtube]ho_RRiuLjpY[/video]
-
6 Replies
-
Yeah but those middle European countries are pretty barbaric eh? It could never happen in the USA for example, they are so tolerant and FREE!
-
Does Christina not realize this atrocity took place in Georgia America not in Europe.If I ever have to go to prison as male or female I would choose Europe every time.My apologies if Christina is just being ironic.
Jenny -
She is!
-
Sometimes irony and sarcasm is too subtle for print.
-
I am surprised about the light hearted response to the article I posted.
Are all those resorting to irony and sarcasm on this thread absolutely sure the same thing couldn’t happen in an Australian prison?
A quick search on Google leads me to the conclusion it is a topic that is worthy of much more serious discussion. -
I apologize for my ironic response but there is so much shit going down in the US in particular ( I tend to expect it in Countries where people are ill informed or uneducated and ignorant of Trans issues) but the US purports to be the land of the free etc and yet IMO is the most IGNORANT and BACKWARD god loving country in the Western world and frankly, I despair! What can we do or say to change things when their own President is treated as some sort of usurper and fails to change the thickheads that are the Right on such fundamentals as Health care for the poor?
Is it different in our country? Well Kate MacGregor says our “Rightwinger” is Trans sensitive but can we trust that? I do not know.As I say, 2015 and we are going backwards in the level of leadership that we rely on for our freedoms and as I said,I despair.
