CBS5.com
(AP) San Francisco – A transgender woman who claims she was repeatedly raped and beaten by a male cell mate went to court this week to challenge a state policy that assigns inmates like her to men?s or women?s prisons depending on whether they have undergone sex-change surgery.
Alexis Giraldo, 30, claims that Folsom State Prison guards ignored her complaints of abuse and returned her to the same cell until a subsequent assault got her placed in protective custody and eventually moved to another facility.
Giraldo, who was born a man but lives as a woman and takes hormones to feminize her appearance, is suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for emotional distress and violating her constitutional right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.
?Prisons are violent places, and male prisons are especially violent places,? said Greg Walston, a San Francisco lawyer who took on Giraldo?s case pro bono. ?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.?