The Illinois Department of Corrections
(IDOC) has transferred a transgender woman from a men's to a women's
prison.
According to the AP, Deon “Strawberry”
Hampton, who is serving a 10-year sentence for burglary, fought a
yearlong legal battle to be transferred.
Hampton, 27, was represented in federal
court by the MacArthur Justice Center and the Uptown People's Law
Center. Her lawyers argued that the move would minimize the violence
and taunting she faced in male prisons.
A federal court sided with Hampton's
argument that her equal protection rights were being violated, the
second of only two such rulings by a federal court.
Hampton is the only transgender female
inmate being held in an Illinois prison for women, one of her lawyers
said.
Hampton claims that she was routinely
subjected to violence while serving in male prisons, including being
forced by guards to perform sex acts with another transgender inmate
as they watched, hurled slurs and taunted the pair.
Clinical psychiatrist George Brown
wrote in a filing that Hampton has identified as female since the age
of 5.