Paedophile prisoner loses gender surgery bid The Times 21.12.19

The original article is here.

A transgender paedophile has lost her bid to be referred for NHS funded gender reassignment surgery while she serves a prison sentence.

The 60-year-old, known only as KK for legal reasons, had sought reassignment surgery after she transitioned from male to female while in jail.

She has been in prison for more than a decade serving an indefinite sentence for public protection for making indecent photographs of children.

The prisoner claimed that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London breached her human rights by unlawfully adopting a policy barring transgender prisoners from being referred for genital surgery. She also claimed the policy was unlawful because the trust had adopted it without consulting patients or publishing it.

She claimed that it departed from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidance, which says that prisoners should not be discriminated against.

The trust said that the reason KK, who is in an open prison, was not referred was because clinicians did not consider it appropriate.

Mr Justice Supperstone said in a High Court written judgment yesterday that the trust had acted lawfully and there had been no blanket policy of refusing to refer prisoners or a breach of the World Professional Association guidance. He said that the fact she was in prison and not in the community was “clinically relevant”.

He added that although KK had been informed by the clinic that she could obtain a separate opinion to seek treatment elsewhere, she had not done so.

In September 2006, she was sentenced as a man after being convicted of making indecent photographs of children. She has previous convictions for possessing or downloading indecent images of children and a conviction for sexual assault over four years on a girl aged between 12 and 16.

The ruling said that KK had raised the issue of gender identity in prison and in 2011 told a doctor that if given the opportunity to change gender, her risk of re-offending would be reduced.

One of the doctors at the London Gender Identity Clinic who assessed KK in 2012 noted that “it was always difficult to assess prisoners particularly those with sexual offences as there are a variety of motivations behind seeking a social change of gender role in prisons, quite apart from the straightforward one of gender identity disorder”.

The Tavistock and Portman Foundation Trust said it could not comment on individual cases.