§ Dr. Lynne JonesTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what guidelines relate to the type of prison establishment to which transsexual offenders are committed; and if he will make it his policy to house pre-operative transsexuals in the gaols of their new gender if they have had two or more years of hormone therapy. [23853]
§ Mr. Michael ForsythResponsibility for this matter has been delegated to the Director General of the Prison Service, who has been asked to arrange for a reply to be given.
Letter from Derek Lewis to Dr. Lynne Jones, dated 22 May 1995:
The Home Secretary has asked me to reply to your recent Question about the guidelines which relate to the type of prison establishment to which transsexual offenders are committed.The particular difficulties experienced by transsexual prisoners have always been accepted by the Prison Service, which recognises it has a duty of care towards those committed by the courts, while at the same time having to take account of a prisoner's legal gender, as currently determined by a prisoner's birth certificate—a document at present understood in law to be immutable.It is well understood that where transsexual offenders are concerned, a wide and complex range of physical, presentational, and psychiatric needs exist. For this reason the Prison Service adopts, in practice, a pragmatic approach once a full physical and psychiatric assessment has been made and the help of any specialist psychiatrist already involved in that individual's care before imprisonment has been sought. In virtually all such cases, the initial placement of an offender will correspond to his genetic gender and birth certificate: definitive location will be arranged only after careful, and often necessarily lengthy, assessment.Following assessment, the principal issues which the Prison Service takes into account when considering allocation are the anticipated reaction of other prisoners and the difficulties likely to be encountered by a transsexual who may be allocated to an establishment which he/she considers to be inappropriate. While it is important that such prisoners should be offered, and avail themselves of, as wide a regime of activities as any other prisoners, in our experience many will request (and manage best) under the protection afforded by Prison Rule 43. A proportion will prefer to remain in the Prison Health Care Centre.In view of the fact that in many instances gender dysphoria is only one facet of a very complex set of personality difficulties, it would be impractical to seek to prescribe anything other than these general guidelines for the management of transsexuals. By their nature, each particular individual will require a solution specific to himself/herself at that particular time in his/her history.