Transsexual Killer Transferred to Women's Prison in U.K.

A convicted killer who is also a transwoman won a human rights case to be transferred to a women's prison in the U.K.

A Sept. 5 article in the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported that "Prisoner A" had gone to court to seem the transfer based on her identification as a woman despite being anatomically male.

Her argument rested in part on the requirement that before she can have gender reassignment surgery, she is required to live for two years as a woman--something she would not be able to do as long as she was housed in a facility for male inmates.

The High Court ruled in favor of "Prisoner A," the article said, despite hearing that the prisoner, who also was convicted of attempted rape, may yet pose a threat to other female inmates.

Moreover, the article said that the female inmates in the facility to which Prisoner A is to be moved will not be informed of her criminal record.

However, the article also said that Prisoner A would start off being kept apart from the prison's general population.

The article detailed that Prisoner A was barred from wearing women's clothing outside of her cell while incarcerated among male prisoners, and that she was not allowed to use much makeup.

However, Prisoner A, who is receiving hormone therapy, now has breasts and goes by a woman's name, making her confinement among male prisoners problematic.

The article said that Prisoner A had strangled a male lover to death when he refused to fund her sex-change procedure; Prisoner A was convicted on manslaughter charges in 2001 and sentenced to five years, but was out on parole the following year.

Then she attempted to rape a woman who worked in a shop and sent back to prison for life.

Prisoner A's attorney, Phillippa Kaufmann, argued that Prisoner A's criminal acts sprang from her frustrated need to become a woman physically, in order to have her body reflect her female identity.

The Daily Mail item quoted Kaufmann as saying, "She lives as a woman amongst men on a vulnerable prisoners' unit and she can't wear what she wants or more than subtle make-up. They are an important statement of her femaleness."

Prisoner A argued before the court that, "The Prison Service seems to have confused attitudes about all this. They will not consider me as a female until I have my penis removed.

"Yet they resist moving me to the female estate which would enable the surgery to be arranged," Prisoner A continued.

"No one can take my female status away from me," stated the prisoner.

"Till the day I die I will be a woman. All that remains is surgery."

In the United States, most states incarcerate individuals according to their anatomy. Transwomen who retain male genitalia therefore are housed with male inmates, which can lead to sexual abuse at the hands of other inmates, as was the case for a transwoman named Dee Farmer, who had male genitalia but had developed breasts due to hormone treatments; Farmer was subsequently beaten and raped, being infected with HIV in the process. Farmer's case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in 1994, the Court ruled that the prison officials who failed to act to protect Farmer were liable for "deliberate indifference," according to a Wikipedia article.

Transmen also face abuse when housed in women's facilities, according to a Wikipedia article on LGBT issues and prison. However, the Wikipedia article said, in those cases it tends to be the prison staff, rather than the inmates, who are the perpetrators.

One alternative to housing transsexual prisoners with the general populations of either gender is to put them in solitary confinement, although with the effect of denying them education or training and other services and privileges.