While it seems like the whole world is obsessed with the Netflix series, “Orange Is the New Black,” Ashley Diamond is living it.
Diamond is a transgender woman from the conservative town of Rome, Georgia, who has been deliberately defeminized since her arrival at the Georgia intake center since 2012, according to the New York Times.
The state of Georgia must take immediate action to prevent unjust treatment to transgendered people or else Diamond, along with other transgender inmates, will continue to suffer the same fate, including degrading abusive treatment, the denial of necessary hormone therapy and sexual harassment and assault.
According to the New York Times last week, transgender women in male prisons are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the general population, with 59 percent reporting sexual assaults.
A first-time inmate at 33 who committed a nonviolent offense, Diamond underwent a series of high-security lockups for violent male prisoners. She has undergone drastic physical changes without hormones, and has been raped at least seven times by inmates, according to the New York Times. She has also been mocked by prison officials as a “he-she thing” and thrown into solitary confinement for “pretending to be a woman.” In a desperate attempt to escape this torture, she has even tried to castrate and kill herself.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act program regulations state that correctional agencies should consider each case individually in deciding where to house a transgender inmate in order to ensure a safe, secure environment.
However, almost all have continued the practice of assigning transgender women to men’s prisons and jails, according to Just Detention International, an organization dedicated to ending sexual abuse in detention.
Under Georgia’s “freeze-frame” policy, transgender inmates could not start or expand treatment in prison but could be maintained on medication they were using when they entered the system. This, the Justice Department said Thursday, surpassed prison officials’ obligation to assess and treat gender dysphoria, the name for the condition that people have when they are born into the wrong body, as they would any other condition.
Transgender women such as Diamond should feel safe and secure, and have the human right to express their individual identities through grooming, pronoun use – the person should be referred to in a way that makes them comfortable – and dress. Prison officials should also supply them with safer housing and hormone therapy while they are incarcerated.
Georgia, as well as other states, should treat gender dysphoria like any other health condition and provide individual assessment and care in order to ensure a safe and secure environment for transgender inmates.
Courts across the nation continue to wrestle with the question of what treatment prisons must provide to transgender inmates. However, according to Fox News, a federal judge ruled yesterday that California must provide sex reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate. Sex reassignment surgery is the surgical procedure by which a transgender person’s physical appearance and function of his or her existing sexual characteristics are altered to resemble that of his or her identified sex.
This is indeed a step in the right direction toward justice for transgender inmates, and hopefully California will serve as an example for Georgia and any other states that still the institutional abuse of trans people.
Abuse is abuse, regardless of whether it is taking place behind bars or behind a white picket fence.
Morgan Maitoza is a junior journalism major.