Whitney Lee has lived as a woman for 18 years. The 36-year-old Lee has had a troubled life. She is currently incarcerated at the Mansfield (OH) Correctional Institute for men, serving a three-year sentence on charges of forgery and theft in Hamilton County (Cincinnati).
Lee had been on continuous hormone therapy since 1999 at home, in federal prison, and at the Hamilton County Justice Center before a prison psychiatrist determined in 2012 that she "lacked the criteria for gender identity disorder" and determined that her therapy was therefore contra-indicated.
I can only imagine that means that Whitney did not measure "feminine enough" on something like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index...which in my own experience is a measurement of how stereotypically masculine or feminine a person might be.
Gender dysphoria is characterized in the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as "a marked difference between the individual's expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her." The DSM elaborates, "It must continue for at least six months. In children, the desire to be of the other gender must be present and verbalized. This condition causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning."
--Parker Marie Molloy, The Advocate
Lee's attorney argued that without the treatments, she lost breast tissue, had her voice deepen and her skin become coarser, and her facial hair began growing. But on a more negative level, she grew irritable, angry, and depressed to the point that she was placed on suicide watch.
Deprivation of hormone treatment wreaks havoc on Ms. Lee’s physical and mental health and puts her life in danger.
--Ms. Lee's complaint
Last Friday, after a two-day hearing federal Judge Algernon Marbley
ordered the state to permanently continue the therapy. Last month, the judge had issued an order to continue the treatment until the hearing.
Lee’s attorney, Ngozi Ndulue, said the judge’s decision was the right one and means Lee will get the treatment until released from prison in about seven months. Lee’s damages claim for $75,000 is still in place, Ndulue said.
The Ohio division of prisons argued that Lee did not follow the prison grievance procedure before filing suit...and pointed to a case in Texas where the withholding of an inmate's treatment was upheld by the court. The state claimed that even if the medical diagnosis was in error, the case was one of medical malpractice and not a violation of Lee's constitutional rights.
Transgender prisoners are highly likely to spend much of their incarceration in solitary confinement because of their gender non-conformity.
Transgender women in prisons are thirteen times more likely than other inmates to be sexually assaulted while incarcerated and are at particular risk of self harm.