FEBRUARY 2016 newspaper
Texas Prisons Expand Hormone Therapy Treatment To More Transgender Inmates By Carimah Townes, Feb 8 2016 published on Think Progress
The Radical Work of Healing: Fania and Angela Davis on a New Kind of Civil Rights Activism By Sarah van Gelder, Feb 21 2016,
published in YES! Magazine
Nearly one year after the Department of Justice confirmed that denying hormone therapy for transgender people in prison is cruel and unusual punishment, Texas just loosened its strict guidelines for who could receive the treatment. Texas’ Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) policy now allows prisoners to receive hormone therapy behind bars, even though they weren’t undergoing therapy prior to their incarceration. Until last week, TDCJ only provided the treatment plan for inmates who went through hormone therapy before they were locked up. Now, any prisoner who is diagnosed with gender dysphoria — “clinically significant distress or impairment that is associated with the marked incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender” — can qualify for the treatment. Hormone therapy typically includes estrogen for trans women and testosterone for trans men. TDCJ’s altered its policy in accordance with the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) updated classification of gender dysphoria, which is now considered a diagnosable condition. The change marks a small breakthrough for the state’s 212 transgender prisoners, but there are still many hoops they have to jump through in order to receive the hormones. “Offenders are prescribed hormone therapy only after going through a rigorous process that includes being reviewed by a gender dysphoria specialist, an endocrinologist, and having an affirmative diagnosis,” Jason Clark, a spokesman for the TDCJ, clarified. “Only then would it be considered medically necessary and require the minimum level of treatment which is hormone therapy.” LGBT policy advocates believe the policy is a slight improvement, but can still keep prisoners waiting long periods of time for treatment. Lambda Legal attorney Demoya Gordon told the Associated Press, “We’re hearing from people that, for example, if they’re not close to the point where they’re going to try to perform surgery on themselves, or commit suicide or something like that, that their needs for treatment are not being taken seriously.” Transgender people have a much higher suicide attempt rate than people in the general population, due to rejection, discrimination, violence, and harassment. The denial of health care, including hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery, is one of many ways prisons systematically discriminate against trans inmates, and it can fuel self-harm. In the past few years, several trans inmates have made headlines for the drastic actions they took to change their bodies. Georgia prisoner Ashley Diamond, who was repeatedly raped and denied hormone treatments was so desperate that she attempted to castrate and kill herself. Michelle Norsworthy attempted suicide multiple times before a federal judge in California ruled that the state’s department of corrections had to provide sex reassignment surgery. That judge cited a trans woman who castrated herself in a Texas prison and forced the state
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Angela Davis and her sister Fania Davis were working for social justice before many of today’s activists were born. From their childhood in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where their friends were victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, to their association with the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party, to their work countering the prison-industrial complex, their lives have centered on lifting up the rights of African Americans. In 1969, Angela Davis was fired from her teaching position at UCLA because of her membership in the Communist Party. She was later accused of playing a supporting role in a courtroom kidnapping that resulted in four deaths. The international campaign to secure her release from prison was led by, among others, her sister Fania. Angela was eventually acquitted and continues to advocate for criminal justice reform. Inspired by Angela’s defense attorneys, Fania became a civil rights lawyer in the late 1970s and practiced into the mid-1990s, when she enrolled in an indigenous studies program at the California Institute of Integral Studies and studied with a Zulu healer in South Africa. Upon her return, she founded Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. Today, she is calling for a truth and reconciliation process focused on the historic racial trauma that continues to haunt the United States. Sarah van Gelder: You were both activists from a very young age. I’m wondering how your activism grew out of your family life, and how you talked about it between the two of you. Fania Davis: When I was still a toddler, our family moved into a neighborhood that had been all white. That neighborhood came to be known as Dynamite Hill because black families moving in were harassed by the Ku Klux Klan. Our home was never bombed, but homes around us were. Continued on Page 7...