Trans inmate says she doesn’t belong in an NC men’s prison: ‘They know I’m not a man’
Ashlee Inscoe has asked to be moved out of a men’s prison in North Carolina.
She has requested surgery to protect herself from life-threatening health problems.
North Carolina prison officials haven’t allowed either to happen.
Now a legal team and activists are rallying around Inscoe to get her the help she needs.
Inscoe is a 40-year-old intersex, transgender woman.
Inscoe told The News & Observer in an interview Monday that doctors believed she was male when she was born because of how her anatomy developed. But when she reached puberty she began her menstrual cycle, with complications that endangered her health.
Doctors began DNA testing and learned she carried two X chromosomes.
Since then, doctors have uncovered some undeveloped reproductive tissue that could be fatal if it isn’t removed. That’s what Inscoe is now fighting with prison officials to have removed.
N.C. Department of Public Safety officials say that federal and state laws bar them from speaking about specifics of her case.
Inscoe’s story
Inscoe grew up believing she was male.
Until her mother realized something was wrong and had a pediatrician examine her.
“They did some labs and drew blood and came up with some answers,” Inscoe said. “They said, ‘Well, there’s a condition known as hermaphrodite,’ and my whole family kept it a secret. They kept it quiet.”
At school, Inscoe felt ostracized.
Teachers wouldn’t let her use the boys’ bathroom, but they also wouldn’t let her use the girls’ bathroom. Instead she used staff bathrooms.
“Everybody wanted me to be a boy based on what the first doctor said,” Inscoe said. “I was punished for being a girl.”
Once her menstrual cycle began, doctors chose to stop it by giving Inscoe a hysterectomy.
Then she was forced to change schools.
“I was constantly bullied,” Inscoe said. “I mean relentlessly. I was sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, beat up and raped in prison.
“It’s not something I would wish on everybody.”
Her attorneys wrote in a letter to the Department of Public Safety that she contracted HIV in prison after she was raped by three men.
Prison time
Inscoe has been in and out of prison since turning 18.
She gained statewide recognition under her previous name around four years ago when she called a Charlotte television station and admitted to bank robbery.
Several bank robberies.
She told the TV station she planned to do it again and that if the police approached her she would kill herself.
DPS lists many convictions on her record, including indecent liberties with a 13-year-old when she was 18.
Her other convictions in North Carolina include common law forgery, hit and run, larceny, breaking and entering, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, reckless driving, obtaining property by counterfeit money, breaking and entering vehicles, worthless check, obtaining property by false pretense, uttering forged papers, speeding to elude arrest, giving fictitious info to a law enforcement officer, attempted larceny from a person, habitual felon, possession of a firearm by a felon and shoplifting.
She is also a registered sex offender.
Her attorneys said she’s been housed in prison systems in other states as well, including California, where she was in a women’s prison.
When she called the TV station she told them she didn’t want to hurt anyone but needed the money after contracting AIDS 12 years earlier, the Statesville Record and Landmark reported.
“The reason I did it wasn’t to hurt nobody,” Inscoe told the television station. “It wasn’t to go in there and just get a bunch of money and blow it. I’ve got to spend $4,000 a month to stay alive with medications out of my pocket. Because I don’t have a job, I don’t have insurance.”
Life behind bars
Inscoe is currently serving a maximum of 13 years and 10 months sentence at the Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institute in Spruce Pine.
It’s a medium-security prison that houses up to 810 men.
Her attorneys detail in their letter what life is like for Inscoe in the prison:
▪ She suffers daily from near-constant verbal and physical harassment.
▪ She is forced to participate in intrusive searches by men and in front of men.
▪ Prison guards only use her former, or dead name, and will not use her chosen pronouns.
▪ She showers with other men.
▪ She is forced to sleep in a dorm with 33 other men.
▪ When they sleep, they are not allowed to wear pants.
▪ And men often grab her breasts and bottom, the letter states.
“I’m constantly treated like a man when they know I’m not a man,” Inscoe said. “They keep refusing to transfer me to a female facility based on these vague security and safety issues that they’re not privy to tell anyone about and I get treated like an animal.”
Inscoe said she deals with hate on a regular basis for being intersex.
“Every day she is housed among men, forced to shower in group showers for men, and subjected to the constant indignities and threats to her health and safety that come with the refusal to acknowledge her core identity,” the attorneys wrote. “These gross violations of Ms. Inscoe’s constitutional and other rights are putting her at a great risk of serious harm.”
Attorneys said Inscoe requested in April 2020 to be moved to a female prison and in September 2020 had two doctors confirm she’s intersex and transgender.
But in November 2020, her request was denied.
“At this time, Ms. Inscoe’s physical and emotional health are greatly deteriorating and further harm can only be avoided through DPS’s immediate compliance with her request for transfer to the North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women,” the attorneys wrote to DPS.
Suffering
Inscoe told The N&O that she has abdominal pain.
“For whatever reason, I get told that they don’t even care if I’m in pain or hurting,” Inscoe said.
On June 1, a doctor submitted a medical request to the prison but officials denied Inscoe the surgery, the attorneys wrote.
Those requests go to a group called the Facility Transgender Accommodation Review Committee, known as FTARC. A written policy provided to The News & Observer by the prison system said the committee is made up of psychiatrists, behavior health officials, primary care providers, nurses, administration, unit managers and the facility Prison Rape Elimination Act compliance manager.
It’s their job to review these types of requests and make a decision.
“In response to this request, the Utilization Review Board (UR) has indicated that it will not approve her request for the surgery, the attorneys wrote. “In the view of the UR, such surgery is not medically necessary but rather gender-affirming care and would therefore need to be approved by the TARC (though the facility medical staff has told Ms. Inscoe that this is a medical issue entirely separate from gender affirming care),” her attorneys wrote.
Endocrinology
Dr. Deanna Adkins, a doctor at Duke University Hospital who specializes in gender disorders, said one in every 400 babies are born intersex, but there’s such a stigma around that that most people don’t talk about it.
Adkins said the word “intersex” is an umbrella term for various conditions in sexual anatomy or biology where there is overlapping between male and female. This is often caused when a fetus is exposed to a high level of hormones before birth, she said.
Inscoe said her mother took the hormone known as progestin at the time of her pregnancy after having a series of miscarriages.
Such hormones can cause an intersex condition, according to Adkins and the Intersex Society of North America.
Adkins has not reviewed Inscoe’s medical files or examined her.
Depending on the nature of the reproductive tissue in Inscoe’s abdomen, Adkins said it could either lead to cancer or cause complications to her reproductive system that itself could lead to death.
She said there is also trauma associated with cases like Inscoe’s in which someone believed they were one gender and learned otherwise.
“The biggest things are identity, trauma, and all those things certainly sound like a high-risk situation for the patient,” Adkins said.
Medical care
Elizabeth Simpson, an attorney overseeing Inscoe’s case, told The N&O that her client’s lack of access to health care isn’t solely based on her being transgender or intersex.
She said that the system’s medical staff is chronically underfunded and often has trouble hiring.
She said the pandemic has compounded the problem.
“You have people who’ve gone without their chronic care needs met,” Simpson said. “They’re just not getting the labs and getting physicals to track if they’re healthy, because there’s simply not the staff in the prisons to take care of them.”
Simpson said transporting people in a pandemic in and out of the prison was risky and that also delayed health care.
Simpson said she believes that prison deaths over the past year and a half increased not only due to the virus but due to lack of access to care for chronic conditions.
Helping Inscoe
Lawyers with Emancipate NC, TGI Justice Project and interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth are working to get Inscoe moved to a women’s prison and get her surgery.
Attorneys from all three organizations threatened legal action if their demands weren’t met by Aug. 24.
Simpson said before resorting to litigation they are trying a public campaign to appeal through others to get Inscoe help.
The organizations launched a website Wednesday on the Emancipate NC site complete with scripts for phone calls, pre-written social media posts and letters and the numbers and addresses of where to send their requests to take Inscoe’s case seriously.
In the meantime, Inscoe called one of the three organizations Sept. 8 and told them she heard that her request will be reviewed again on Sept. 9. An update has not yet been provided to her legal team by Inscoe or prison officials.
John Bull, spokesman for the N.C. Department of Corrections, told The N&O in a written statement that each individual’s case is reviewed and decided on a case-by-case basis.
“What we can tell you is that requests for transgender accommodations, which would include medical procedures, by policy are reviewed by a multi-disciplinary committee,” Bull said.
Transgender prisoners’ rights
In 2019, North Carolina prison officials agreed to move Kanautica Zayre-Brown, a transgender woman, out of a male prison and into a female prison, The N&O previously reported.
She is believed to be the first transgender woman moved out of a male prison in North Carolina.
Like Inscoe, Zayre-Brown was forced to shower with men and called by her birth name that she legally changed, The N&O reported.
The ACLU stepped in and fought to help Zayre-Brown get moved to a women’s facility.
This story was originally published September 14, 2021 at 1:23 PM.
