On the same day The New York Times is chiding Rolling Stone magazine for forwarding unsubstantiated tales of sexual assault by trusting a single source, it’s channeling them on Monday’s front page, and promoting the idea of taxpayer-funded hormone therapy for transgender prisoners – now being pushed by the Obama Justice Department.
The sympathetic headline was “‘Every Day I Struggle’: Transgender Inmate Cites Attacks and Abuse in Men’s Prison.” Times reporter Deborah Sontag achieved perfection – if that’s defined as composing a 2,619-word article without a single critical word about taxpayer-funded hormone therapy for crooks, or the transgender agenda in general.
The sympathetic center of the story is convict Ashley Diamond -- "unwittingly" given a unisex name at birth. As the Times story sprawled all over page A-12 with seven color photographs, it took 42 paragraphs to get to the substance of Diamond’s criminality:
Ms. Diamond said her downfall began with boyfriends, and one in particular, who convinced her nobody could love her but them and led her into drugs and petty criminality. She started being arrested, getting barred from places like Taco Bell and Pawn Mart, and getting sentenced to probation.
In the fall of 2010, Mr. Sumlin returned to his apartment in Atlanta to find the air-conditioning unit askew. Eventually he realized checks were missing and had been cashed. His bank insisted that he call the police, he said, and Ms. Diamond was found to be the culprit. Mr. Sumlin said she stole just under $10,000.
That’s the most negative piece of information in the entire thing – and Mr. Sumlin is still a fan of Diamond’s, complaining of her prison term: “You’d have thought she murdered a small village.”
There’s a mention of “her” burglary on the front page, but it paled in comparison to “her” rape allegations, forwarded by the Times without proof:
A first-time inmate at 33 whose major offense was burglary, Ms. Diamond was sent to a series of high-security lockups for violent male prisoners. She has been raped at least seven times by inmates, her lawsuit asserts, with a detailed accounting of each. She has been mocked by prison officials as a ''he-she thing'' and thrown into solitary confinement for ''pretending to be a woman.'' She has undergone drastic physical changes without hormones. And, in desperation, she has tried to castrate and to kill herself several times.
''My biggest concern is that she survives to get out of prison, which I worry about every day,'' said Stephen Sloan, a counselor who treated her at Baldwin State Prison and whose pleas that Ms. Diamond be restarted on hormones were ignored.
But paragraphs 8 and 9 explained Diamond’s suit and Team Obama’s support, all on the front page:
In her lawsuit, Ms. Diamond asks the court to direct prison officials to provide her hormone therapy, to allow her to express her female identity through “grooming, pronoun use and dress,” and to provide her safer housing.
She also seeks broader changes in policy and practice. And the Justice Department, in its support, declared hormone therapy to be necessary medical care, saying Georgia, and other states, must treat “gender dysphoria” like any other health condition and provide “individual assessment and care.”
Or, as the Los Angeles Times reported it, “Denying a transgender prisoner hormone therapy is a violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Justice Department told a court for the first time Friday.”
That newspaper also avoided any critics in a much briefer story, but noted Team Obama “has been increasingly active on transgender issues. It filed suit Monday against Southeastern Oklahoma State University, saying the school had discriminated against a transgender professor.” (The McClatchy wire service also wrote a completely uncritical one-sided story.)
Sontag's story also pushed the requisite radical-left narrative of racism and homophobia creating an institutional conspiracy:
Her lawyer, Chinyere Ezie of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Ms. Diamond's case dramatized the ''discrimination to incarceration pipeline'' that disproportionately lands transgender people, and especially those who are black like Ms. Diamond, behind bars.
Many face rejection by their families, harassment at school and discrimination in the workplace. Black transgender people have inordinately high rates of extreme poverty, homelessness, suicide attempts and imprisonment; nearly half those surveyed for the National Transgender Discrimination Survey had been imprisoned, compared with 16 percent of the study's 6,450 participants.
And transgender women in male prisons are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than is the general population, with 59 percent reporting sexual assaults, according to a frequently cited California study.
''I wish I could say this is a problem only affecting Ashley,'' Ms. Ezie said. ''But while Ashley is brilliant and unique, her situation is not.''
The entire piece is deeply grounded in sympathy for Diamond and whether she can stay alive. Prison officials clammed up.
Georgia's Department of Corrections has declined to comment about the case. As a matter of policy, it also denied The New York Times's request to interview Ms. Diamond in person at Georgia State Prison, where she was moved a few weeks ago in apparent retaliation for her lawsuit, she claims. Georgia State had more sexual assaults between 2009 and 2014 than all but one other state prison.
Since her arrival there, Ms. Diamond has survived an attempted rape in a stairwell, dealt with inmates exposing themselves and masturbating in front of her, and faced relentless sexual coercion, she said last week in an emergency motion seeking an immediate transfer to a safer institution.
Though Ms. Diamond believes she is championing a cause larger than herself, she has expressed increasing despair. She sobbed continually during a recent visit from her lawyer, and in the phone interview, she said: ''Every day I struggle with trying to stay alive and not wanting to die. Sometimes I think being a martyr would be better than having to live with all this.''
The sympathy continued on Sontag's Twitter account:
Trans Woman in GA prison: "Ok, I'm a sissy. Do you have a place where sissies can be OK?" #gender #identity #prison http://t.co/f29CiDmPPc
— Deborah Sontag (@debsontag) April 6, 2015
