Politics and Culture

SAN FRANCISCO - Alexis Giraldo was born as a man and takes hormones to feminize her appearance, a fact she says prison officials didn't care about even as her male cellmate repeatedly raped and beat her.

Giraldo is suing the state prison system and several guards over the state's policy of assigning inmates like her to men's or women's prisons depending on whether they have had a sex change.

Prisons have a duty to protect inmates as much as possible. If they could have reasonably protected him and didn't, then I feel sympathy for Giraldo. However, it's my understanding that rapes aren't an infrequent occurrence in prisons. Do all of them have a right to sue?

"Prisons are violent places, and male prisons are especially violent places," said Greg Walston, a lawyer who took Giraldo's for free and asked a jury this week for unspecified damages. "You take that boiling cauldron and you put one woman in there — which is exactly what happened here — and it's like throwing a fresh piece of meat into a lion's cage."

If, however, Giraldo is saying that he should have received special treatment because he chose to look like a woman, then I have to withdraw my sympathy. If somebody were to go to jail in California and had a Swastika on his forehead, he had better spend his last free day at a laser removal center. Likewise, Giraldo should have dropped the hormones until such time as he could resume his transgendering, if that was the reason he was attacked. Otherwise, to place the entire burden on the state, would be to imply that the state should separate small inmates from the big ones and so on.