Tag: prison

Suspicious Death in Sydney

Posted by helenboyd – April 12, 2011

A woman named Veronica Baxter died in police custody a year ago. Inquiries into how she died and what the circumstances were surrounding her death have gone unanswered: local activists call it a charade and have reasons to be suspicious, including emergency calls made by Baxter the night of her death, and reports that she was happy and smiling.

The inquiry revealed Baxter made four emergency calls during the night of her death. No witness addressed if those emergency calls had been answered, or by who.

The inquiry also revealed all the psychological assessments made of Baxter before her death said she was not suicidal. One counsellor said she was “smiling, happy and talking”.

I hope they can get some kind of definitive answer, and justice if there was any wrong doing.

Hormones Are a Right

Posted by helenboyd – February 10, 2011

US District (Federal) Judge Clevert struck down a Wisconsin law prohibiting trans people from receiving drugs in prison.

In Wednesday’s order, Clevert found that the law amounts to “deliberate indifference to the plaintiffs’ serious medical needs in violation of the Eighth Amendment,” because it denies hormone therapy without regard to those needs or doctors’ judgments. He found the law unconstitutional on its face and also in violation of the inmates’ rights to equal protection.

In other words, he made it possible for doctors to decide what is appropriate medical treatment: sanity prevails occasionally.

This is good, good news.

WI: Hormones Can’t Be Banned for Inmates

Posted by helenboyd – April 3, 2010

At long last, some good news: U.S. District Judge Charles N. Clevert Jr. declared a law banning hormones from transgender inmates unconstitutional. The law was passed in response to an inmate who sued when denied genital surgery:

State law makers passed the Sex Change Prevention Act in 2005 in reaction to the case of a Wisconsin inmate who had been receiving the hormones for years, but sued when the Department of Corrections would not pay for sex-change surgery. Similar challenges were mounted in other states.


What’s interesting to me is that there is no mention of why an inmate might want genital surgery aside from being transgender: inmates are housed based on their genitals. That is, if a transgender woman has been living for 10 years in the female gender, but has not had genital surgery, she can be housed with male inmates.

Amazing how they never mention that in the light of “cruel and unusual.”

I’m not “for” taxpayers paying for surgeries for inmates, either, to be honest, but I am if the law is too dumb to understand and recognize an individual’s right to self-determine his/her gender. The same people who are concerned about taxpayers paying for these surgeries should get behind lightening the requirements to legally change gender identity on ID cards (but they won’t, since their objection is usually not based at all on making the lives of transgender people humane).