In 2019, Cristina Iglesias filed a lawsuit that modified the course of therapy for herself and different transgender inmates in federal custody.
Iglesias, a trans lady who had been incarcerated for greater than 25 years, was transferred from a males’s jail to a ladies’s one in 2021. And in 2022, she reached a landmark settlement with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to obtain gender-affirming surgical procedure, which the company stated it had by no means offered for anybody in its custody.
By the point she received the surgical procedure 10 months later, one other federal inmate had additionally obtained a process to align their physique with their gender id. No different such surgical procedures for individuals in federal custody are publicly documented, though some individuals in state prisons have additionally obtained gender-affirming surgical procedure, together with no less than 5 in Illinois and 20 in California inside a U.S. jail inhabitants that tops 1.25 million individuals.
Nonetheless, these procedures loomed massive within the 2024 presidential election. Political promoting for President Donald Trump and different Republicans included $215 million on anti-trans advertisements, in response to media monitoring agency AdImpact. One such advert declared that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris supported “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” and concluded, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Some Democrats bemoaned the advertisements as having helped tip the election.
Within the run-up to the Nov. 5 election, 55% of voters felt assist for trans rights had gone too far, in response to VoteCast, a survey by The Related Press and companions together with KFF, the well being coverage analysis, polling, and information group that features KFF Well being Information.
On Inauguration Day, Trump issued a flurry of govt orders that included a directive to bar federal spending on gender-affirming care in federal prisons and to “ensure that males are not detained” in federal ladies’s amenities.
“President Trump received an overwhelming mandate from the American people to restore commonsense principles and safeguard women’s spaces — even prisons — from biological men,” White Home spokesperson Anna Kelly wrote in an electronic mail. “Forcing taxpayers to pay for gender transition for prisoners is the exact sort of insanity that the American people rejected at the ballot box in November.”
However for Iglesias, 50, Trump’s order was a stunning reversal.
“It puts someone’s life in danger being in a men’s prison as a trans woman,” she stated from Chicago, the place she’s lived since her launch in 2023. “It’d be like putting sheep in a hyenas’ den.”
Iglesias stated she confronted emotional and bodily abuse from her father for her need to be feminine. When she was 12, she stated, he put a gun in her mouth after discovering her carrying her sister’s garments. Iglesias stated she ran away from house, stole checks, vehicles, and jewellery, and ended up in jail.
Lockup was not enjoyable, Iglesias stated, nevertheless it was the primary place she received to be handled as a lady. So, she stated, she needed to remain. In 1994, she landed in federal jail after writing threatening letters to federal judges and prosecutors, in response to courtroom filings. In 2005, data present, she pleaded responsible to sending a letter to British officers that she falsely claimed contained anthrax. She informed investigators she hoped to get extradited.
“I was reading these things where they were allowing trans females to start living with females,” Iglesias stated.
She stated her outlook modified after the demise of her mom in 2010, which prompted her to get severe about having a life outdoors of jail, and about bettering her life inside it.
She started requesting hormone remedy in 2011 and was accepted for it in 2015, in response to courtroom data. The 2019 lawsuit that led to her switch to a ladies’s jail and her surgical procedure was initially handwritten and ready with the assistance of solely one other inmate.
“The lawsuit was the foundation for everything that I am today,” Iglesias stated. “For the first time in my life, instead of digging myself in these holes, I was digging myself out.”
Alongside together with her settlement, Iglesias obtained a dedication from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to create a timeline for contemplating different inmates’ requests for gender-affirming care, and to acknowledge everlasting hair removing and gender-affirming surgical procedure as medically obligatory remedies for gender dysphoria — a medical situation through which the discrepancy between an individual’s gender id and their intercourse assigned at delivery causes important misery.
In February, in response to Trump’s govt order, the bureau issued new tips requiring jail staffers to consult with inmates’ “legal name or pronouns corresponding to their biological sex,” and ending clothes requests “that do not align with an inmate’s biological sex.” The rules finish referrals for gender-affirming surgical procedure however permit inmates already receiving therapy, comparable to hormone remedy, to proceed.
Nevertheless, in a lawsuit filed March 7, a trans prisoner alleged the hormone remedy she had been receiving since 2016 was stopped on Jan. 26.
Spokespeople for the bureau didn’t reply to requests for remark.
The bureau spent $153,000 on hormone remedy in fiscal yr 2022, its former director informed Congress, 0.01% of its complete spending on well being care.
The brand new tips on trans inmates say that Trump’s govt order “does not supersede or change” the duty to adjust to federal laws. However the govt order requires amending them to forestall trans ladies from being housed in ladies’s prisons.
“It hurt my heart when I seen that because I do know other girls that are still in prison,” stated Iglesias, who spent greater than 25 years in male amenities. “Female prison is safe for a trans woman, and you can be who you are. You’re not penalized because you’re feminine.”
However requesting a switch to a facility matching inmates’ gender id had not been simple, and few prisoners had been moved earlier than the order. A 2025 authorities courtroom submitting stated that federal prisons home 2,198 trans prisoners out of over 155,000 inmates. Of these, the submitting stated, 22 are trans ladies housed in feminine amenities, and one is a trans man in a males’s facility. Though courts have blocked makes an attempt to maneuver that small subset of trans prisoners after the order, a trans prisoner not included in these fits had been relocated, The Guardian information outlet reported.
A Division of Justice report from 2014 estimated that trans inmates in state and federal prisons had been 10 occasions as seemingly as different prisoners to report incidents of sexual victimization.
Iglesias stated she skilled such violence firsthand. Included in her go well with was a replica of a 2017 psychological report that stated Iglesias reported being the sufferer of sexual misconduct or abuse in 1993, 2001, 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017. Later filings included allegations of getting been raped in 2019 and 2020, and a collection of rapes, threats, and different abuse in 2021 earlier than she was transferred to a feminine facility. Iglesias stated she confronted extra abuse than she formally reported.
“Just because you commit a crime doesn’t mean you deserve to have violence against you,” stated Michelle García, deputy authorized director of the ACLU of Illinois and one of many attorneys who finally represented Iglesias.
Federal legislation requires all inmates to be shielded from abuse. A 1994 Supreme Courtroom determination acknowledged trans inmates as notably weak to assault. Laws from the Jail Rape Elimination Act, handed unanimously by Congress in 2003, comprise particular provisions for trans inmates, together with permitting them to bathe individually from different inmates and requiring jail officers to contemplate their well being and security when deciding whether or not to deal with them in male or feminine amenities.
Courts additionally have dominated that “deliberate indifference” to an inmate’s “serious medical needs” violates the Eighth Modification’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishments. The standard of total medical take care of federal prisoners has come below scrutiny amid stories of inmates going with out wanted medical care and preventable deaths.
Iglesias efficiently argued in courtroom that gender-affirming surgical procedure was obligatory for her gender dysphoria. She was recognized with what was then referred to as “gender identity disorder” quickly after getting into federal custody in 1994, in response to courtroom filings. Her prognosis was up to date to gender dysphoria in 2015.
Iglesias’ courtroom filings documented her having been assessed for the danger of suicide 33 occasions and positioned on suicide watch 12 occasions, in addition to an try at self-castration in 2009.
“Defendants are aware of Iglesias’s suffering, but have delayed her treatment without evaluating her medically,” the choose in her case wrote.
García referred to as the Trump administration’s concentrating on of take care of trans inmates merciless, pointless, and illogical.
“They’re not assessing the constitutional rights of people,” García stated. “They’re making choices because this is a vulnerable community that they can rally people behind to hate.”
