Male inmates at an all-female prison in Fort Worth, Texas, are temporarily restricted from entering or using female-only private areas, a judge decided this week. It is the first time a federal court has ruled that male inmates must be sex-segregated in women’s prisons.
The Federal Medical Center, Carswell is a formerly women-only prison in Texas that currently houses several men who identify as women. FMC Carswell recently housed dozens of people who identify as trans or intersex, according to a federal report.
Female inmates have for years petitioned the state to separate trans-identifying men from women’s private spaces. Sidney Fitzwater, U.S. district judge for the Northern District of Texas in Dallas, Texas, issued a temporary restraining order this week that temporarily forbids FMC Carswell from “housing any male inmate within the general female population in any housing unit where either [female] plaintiff is currently or will be housed.”
FMC Carswell must also keep male inmates out of female-only privacy areas, including “showers, restrooms, changing areas, and dormitory spaces . . . so that plaintiffs are not exposed to male inmates while showering, toileting, dressing, or sleeping.”
The female plaintiffs are Rhonda Fleming and Miriam Crystal Herrera. Fleming has fought in court to exclude male inmates from women’s private spaces for decades now.
“I am being humiliated and degraded every day so that men that identify as women can be comfortable,” Fleming said in 2018.
FMC Carswell must now reassign male inmates to segregated areas in order to comply with the judge’s TRO.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January banning men from being housed in all-women’s prisons. But, a federal judge has blocked the executive order pending litigation on a class-action lawsuit brought against the Trump administration in Washington, D.C., on behalf of thousands of transgender inmates. Several transgender inmates have also been awarded preliminary injunctions that allow them to stay in all-female prisons while the issue plays out in court.
“These women will face the same brutal reality that any woman would face if forced to live in prison among men, they will be sexually assaulted, raped and violently attacked,” an advocate who represented some transgender inmates said in September. “And we know this because it’s already happened to many of them.”
This week’s Texas ruling is unique in that it complies with federal court orders allowing female prisons to house male inmates, by simply requiring those prisons to segregate men from women.
Trump’s DOJ has, however, contested the plaintiffs’ suit on procedural grounds.
“Plaintiffs have no likelihood of prevailing on the merits because they have failed to exhaust mandatory administrative remedies under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995,” acting U.S. Attorney Nancy Larson said in response to the case.
Gary Dean Boone, Zack J. Lawrence, Walter John Meachum, Michael D. Reed, and Michael “Kara” Sternquist are some of the transgender-identifying inmates who are housed at FMC Carswell, according to Fleming and Herrera’s complaint. Also according to the complaint, Lawrence is a convicted sex offender and Reed raped a 75-year-old woman and pleaded guilty to kidnapping and indecent acts with a child.
Lawrence “routinely uses the women’s showers and has been observed frequently engaging in sexual activity with female inmates in the showers,” the complaint said. “Lawrence has a girlfriend and continues to be housed in Two North with female inmates.”
Boone also has “ongoing sexual relationships with female inmates and has been observed sharing a cell naked and having sex with a woman who reportedly suffers from mental illness,” the complaint added.
Similar cases have happened elsewhere in the prison system. At least eleven male convicts, many of whom were convicted for violent crimes against women and children, were allowed to transfer to Washington State’s women’s prison, where some were accused of sexual assault. In Pennsylvania, female inmates were forced to share a cell with a man who they said sexually harassed them. Men in women’s prisons have also impregnated female inmates.
A recent FMC Carswell audit even evaluated the women’s prison’s ability to address “inmate victims of sexually abusive vaginal penetration while incarcerated.”
“Note: in “all-male” facilities, there may be inmates who identify as transgender men who may have female genitalia,” the audit read. “Auditors should be sure to know whether such individuals may be in the population and whether this provision may apply in specific circumstances.”