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The Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing the state of Utah, together with the Utah Department of Corrections (UDOC), for allegedly discriminating in opposition to a transgender inmate who eliminated his personal testicles after affected by gender dysphoria.
In Monday’s announcement, the DOJ claims the state violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by discriminating in opposition to the inmate on the premise of the person’s gender dysphoria “by denying her equal access to healthcare services and failing to reasonably modify policies, practices, or procedures where necessary to avoid discrimination.” The transgender inmate was unnamed within the court docket paperwork.
COLORADO COULD BECOME THE FIRST STATE TO BUILD SEPARATE PRISON UNITS FOR TRANSGENDER FELONS
Barbed wire is seen on the Santa Barbara County Detention and Correctional Facility in Santa Barbara, California, on June 12, 2005. (Getty Images)
“People with gender dysphoria, including those held in jails and prisons, are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act and are entitled to equal access to medical care just like anyone else with a disability,” assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke stated in an announcement Monday. “Delays or refusals to provide medical treatment for people with gender dysphoria can cause irreparable harm, including debilitating distress, depression, attempts at self-treatment and even death by suicide. The Civil Rights Division is committed to protecting the rights of all people with disabilities in our country, including those who experience gender dysphoria — and those rights are not given up at the jailhouse door.”
The DOJ claims the UDOC “has also imposed unnecessary eligibility criteria for evaluation and treatment for gender dysphoria for incarcerated persons at UDOC that it does not require for other health conditions.”
The submitting additionally says the UDOC denied all of the inmate’s requests, together with modifying pat searches, offering feminine make-up, clothes and different objects within the commissary to match the prisoner’s gender identification. Additionally, the UDOC didn’t “individually assess her housing requests” to be transferred to a girls’s jail, and denied requests for male-to-female hormone prescriptions, in keeping with the DOJ.
A guard tower and barbed wire are seen at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, California, on April 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)
In May 2023, the inmate “performed dangerous self-surgery and removed her own testicles, resulting in hospitalization and additional surgery,” the DOJ’s nine-page lawsuit states.
Heritage Foundation authorized fellow Sarah Marshall Perry advised Fox News Digital on Tuesday that the DOJ “is relying on a single, first-of-its-kind federal court decision holding that ‘gender dysphoria’ — the distress that results from a person feeling that he or she is the wrong sex — is a disability that must be accommodated under the Americans with Disabilities Act, even though the precise language of the ADA makes clear that ‘gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments’ are not disabilities for purposes of federal civil rights law.”
“Until and unless another federal circuit finds correctly that a plain reading of the ADA excludes gender identity disorders and gender dysphoria, states — and their affiliated department of corrections — will find themselves at the losing end of demands for ‘gender-affirming care’ on the taxpayer dime,” she stated.
Trans flag. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP through Getty Images)
Last month, the DOJ’s investigation of the state’s penitentiary discovered officers had “unnecessarily delayed” the transgender inmate’s requests. While UDOC doesn’t remark on pending litigation, corrections government director Brian Redd stated final month the state was “blindsided” by the DOJ’s investigation findings, and stated “we fundamentally disagree with the DOJ on key issues, and are disappointed with their approach.”
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The DOJ’s lawsuit comes as a number of states are transferring to offer extra entry to sex-change surgical procedures and non-invasive prescriptions. While California turned the primary state in 2017 to grant these providers to inmates in 2017, Colorado is additionally poised to develop into the primary state within the nation with segregated holding cells for transgender girls in jail.
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