Earlier this fall, Florida officials ordered transgender women in the state’s prisons to submit to breast exams. As part of a new policy for people with gender dysphoria, prison medical staff ranked the women’s breast size using a scale designed for adolescents. Those whose breasts were deemed big enough were allowed to keep their bras. Everyone else had to surrender theirs, along with anything else considered “female,” such as women’s underwear and toiletry items.
The examinations came after people who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by the prison system’s own providers were brought into meetings at the end of September and told of the prisons’ new policy, which would make it nearly impossible for them to get hormone therapy and other gender-affirming medical care, according to interviews and emails with more than a dozen transgender women who said they attended the meetings.
Josie Takach, who is incarcerated in a men’s facility south of Tallahassee, said a male doctor told her to lift up her shirt, then glanced at her breasts and wrote something down without saying a word. When she tried to ask a question, a nurse “told me not to ask any questions and to just shut up and do what I’m told,” she recalled.
“It felt like I was being treated less than human,” she said.
The state’s chapter of the ACLU sued Florida’s Department of Corrections, which operates the prisons, in late October, calling the policy draconian and arguing it amounts to an unconstitutional ban on gender-affirming care. The new policy is the latest maneuver in the culture war around transgender people’s civil rights in the Sunshine State. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis championed a raft of anti-trans legislation, including a law passed last year that prohibited children with gender dysphoria from accessing treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy. A similar law in Tennessee was the subject of arguments in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court last week.
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Allowing any treatment under any circumstances is an admission that the condition is real and needs treated.
The cruelty is the point.