(Photo illustration by Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder).
A Trump-appointed federal judge has declined to dismiss a suit against the Florida Department of Corrections’ policy prohibiting transgender women inmates from having long hair and wearing female underwear and suggesting a block for hormone therapies.
The suit the American Civil Liberties Union filed on behalf of a transgender inmate claims the state’s policy, announced in late September, violates the Eighth Amendment right to necessary medical care for prisoners. The document outlining the policy change states that hormone replacement therapies would only be allowed in rare instances and that inmates would be reevaluated to determine if such treatment was necessary.
Although the suit will move forward, U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor also refused in December to stop the enforcement of the restrictions on grooming, clothing accommodations, and hormone therapy.
The ACLU is representing Reiyn Keohane, who has been receiving hormone therapy as well as grooming and clothing accommodations in a state prison in Wakulla County since 2016, which started as a result of another suit in which the ACLU acted on behalf of Keohane. She is serving a 15-year sentence for attempted second-degree murder.
“The Department says the complaint lacks any allegation that the hormone treatment Keohane is already receiving will end. But at this stage, Keohane has alleged enough,” Winsor wrote in the Friday order.
“Keohane has alleged there was a significant policy shift, that the Department’s new written policy cites a Florida law explicitly prohibiting use of state funds for cross-sex hormones, that the new policy’s default is to disallow hormone treatment with only limited exceptions, and that a prison health official told rounded-up inmates that changes in gender-dysphoria treatment were coming, ‘up to and including hormone therapy.’”
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Although Winsor declined to prevent the suit from becoming a class action at this time, he wrote that the department might be right in its argument that the medical appropriateness of hormone therapies is up for debate.
“The bottom line is that Keohane alleged enough to proceed to discovery. This conclusion is not inconsistent with my order denying a preliminary injunction because the standards are different. In addressing the motion to dismiss, I must accept all factual allegations as true,” Winsor wrote.
“But as to the preliminary injunction motion, Keohane had the burden of proving a substantial likelihood of success on the merits, among other things. Keohane did not meet that evidentiary burden but did meet the pleading burden.”
One of the ACLU attorneys representing Keohane slammed Winsor’s decision allowing the department to enforce the new policy in December.
“Florida officials are waging a baseless campaign to dehumanize and degrade incarcerated people like our client,” Li Nowlin-Sohl, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s LGBTQ + HIV Project, said in a news release.
“Allowing this policy to move forward threatens the basic human rights of transgender people in the state’s custody and the court’s order affords the state’s policy more credulity than it deserves when the clear intent of the state is to ban this health care outright.”
The suit is set for trial in Tallahassee on Nov. 4.
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