the disparity between Federal Prison practices and Military Prison practices if she doesn't get a pardon.
ACLU statement on Chelsea Manning
Submitted by sosadmin on Thu, 08/22/2013 - 12:33
The following can be attributed to Chase Strangio, staff attorney with the ACLU's Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project:
In response to Chelsea Manning's disclosure that she is female, has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and will be seeking hormone therapy as a part of her transition during her incarceration, public statements by military officials that the Army does not provide hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria raise serious constitutional concerns. Gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition in which a person's gender identify does not correspond to his or her assigned sex at birth, and hormone therapy is part of the accepted standards of care for this condition. Without the necessary treatment, gender dysphoria can cause severe psychological distress, including anxiety and suicide. When the government holds individuals in its custody, it must provide them with medically necessary care.
The official policy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and most state agencies is to provide medically necessary care for the treatment of gender dysphoria, and courts have consistently found that denying such care to prisoners based on blanket exclusions violates the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.
http://www.privacysos.org/node/1157They have a chance to win this because gender reassignment surgery
is now available to transgender inmates who did not begin treatment prior to entering federal custody (<<the link is to the Bureau of Prisons memo).
Gender reassignment surgery, along with hormones and specialized mental health counseling is now available to transgender inmates who did not begin treatment prior to entering federal custody, The Associated Press reports.
The decision is based on new rules adopted by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as part of a court settlement for inmate Vanessa Adams, formerly Nicholas Adams, who was diagnosed with gender identity disorder in 2005, and, after being denied treatment, tried to castrate herself with a razor and attempted to and ultimately succeeded in amputating her penis.
A May 31 memo issued to wardens at the nation's 116 federal prisons and made public by gay rights groups states: "current, accepted standards of care" will be applied to inmates who believe they are the wrong gender.
Under the bureau's previous policy, issued in 2005, only federal inmates with a preexisting diagnosis were eligible for transgender-related care, which was limited to treatments that would maintain them "only at the level of change which existed when they were incarcerated."
"The (new) treatment plan may include elements or services that were, or were not, provided prior to incarceration, including, but not limited to: those elements of real life experience consistent with the prison environment, hormone therapy and counseling," the memo from bureau medical director Newton Kendig states.
http://www.thirdage.com/news/surgery-while-in-prison-now-an-option-for-transgender-inmates_10-04-2011Here's the Sept 2011 press release from GLAD:
Federal Bureau of Prisons Makes Major Change in Transgender Medical Policy.
It's a long fight. Many prisons are resisting and still housing transgender women with men where they're
more than 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than cis women. The military is just flat out rejecting anything but some counselling/psychiatric care.
If you want to know more about it, google the "Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003" that the DOJ finally got around to writing rules for in mid 2012. That only covers Federal Prisons, not military prisons though so the ACLU has a fight there.
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