When I can’t sleep, I search LinkedIn for people who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I’m simply interested in what these officers are posting openly about on a free and public website. Good to keep an eye on.
I joined a caravan last month to show support for prisoners who are on a hunger strike over the heinous conditions at the immigration detention center in Adelanto, CA. I saw the barbed concertina wire fences. I felt how cold it was in the desert. I spoke to a lawyer who was outside scrambling to get a notarized signature to stop his client’s imminent deportation to Vietnam.
The Adelanto ICE detention center is run by Geo Group, one of the two biggest private prison companies in the country. According to their website, fourteen Geo Group prisons are currently being used as ICE detention centers. The company also just signed a billion dollar 15-year contract with the US government.
So after I went to Adelanto, late at night, I started looking for Geo Group employees too. Good to keep an eye on.
This led me to ex-Georgia state prison warden Shay Hatcher. He’s not important. The first link I found on Google was a court document where he is one of the named plaintiffs. It was a 2013 lawsuit from a trans woman named Ashley Diamond.
She is important.
Her case, which I am embarrassed to have stumbled upon so randomly despite being trans myself, is one of the most significant trans rights cases in US prison history. Diamond’s claims were a nightmare. Her victory set a powerful legal precedent.
Thirteen years later, in 2026, the Trump administration has obliterated these wins in favor of outright conversion therapy.
They are forcing trans people to detransition in prison. Openly. They say it on a free and public website.
Good to keep an eye on.
In February, the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ new “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria” policy undid what many prison systems called “freeze-framing” for trans prisoners. It meant that whatever was done before incarceration (hormones, surgery) would stay the same after incarceration.
Now, medical care for trans people is not the gender affirming treatments like hormones or social transition that have been proven over and over again to work. It’s been replaced with psychotherapy to eliminate the “symptom” of transness. “Management” of trans inmates means using psychiatry to convince them that they are not trans.
Transness is a negative symptom of mental health co-morbidities like anxiety, depression, or PTSD. Federal prisons are to treat gender dysphoria not as a medical condition with treatments, but as a mental illness to be eradicated.
Social transition items are banned. While cis woman prisoners are allowed to wear make up, trans women will have theirs taken away.
Prescribing new hormones is banned. Even more chillingly, anyone already on hormones will be tapered off them at the rate the prison finds appropriate.
It is official policy to take away a trans persons’ personal belongings for social transition, force them off hormones against medical advice, and send them into intensive psychiatric treatment.
“It is, in every meaningful sense, a blueprint for a government-run conversion therapy program,” the National Center on LGBTQ Rights reported, “one targeting thousands of incarcerated people who have nowhere to turn.”
Just a year ago, a trans prisoners’ care was considered medical. Under Trump’s Federal Bureau of Prisons, it’s now purely psychiatric.
Her story belongs to Ashley Diamond. Hatcher is just one of many villains in it.
Diamond was sentenced to twelve years for pawning a used electric saw, worth less than 200 dollars, that her boyfriend stole. She was placed in the men’s prison Rutledge State, despite having been on hormones since she was a teenager.
In a 2021 them.us article, Diamond wrote that she suffered more than sixteen sexual assaults in a year and a half, including by guards.
“As far as I can tell none of the people who assaulted me have been punished,” Diamond wrote. “Officers call me ‘he-she-it’ and ‘freak,’” she said. She was placed into solitary confinement for a week for “pretending to be a woman.”
She grew facial hair for the first time in her life. The other prisoners used a fan to blow open a shower curtain so they could look at her breasts. In the 2013 court document, Diamond says letters to the Georgia Department of Corrections pleading for help went unanswered.
This was all while Hatcher was in charge of Rutledge, which is bad enough, but his thumbprint shows up directly in a 2015 filing by Diamond’s attorneys.
Hatcher allegedly complained about Diamond’s sexual assault case to an entire housing unit of male prisoners, violating the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Diamond got threatening letters from other inmates calling her a snitch. They said that because she’d been consensually fucked in the ass before, what did it matter if she was assaulted in prison? They said she should drop her complaint or they’d beat her up. Hatcher denied that he leaked information about her, but the men wrote they’d learned about it from Hatcher.
Since that first lawsuit, Ashley Diamond has lived a very hard, very common life for a formerly incarcerated person. In 2019, she was back in prison for a technical parole violation, for “traveling to a treatment center in northern Florida for post-traumatic stress,” she said.
Incarcerated again, Diamond was devastated to see that her fight had accomplished more on paper than in practice.
They put her in men’s prisons again. She was sexually assaulted again. She sued again.
She eventually dropped her second lawsuit because she didn’t want to relive her trauma. By 2023, she’d stepped back and decided to focus on healing. I hope she heals.
Meanwhile, Hatcher left the Georgia Department of Corrections in early 2024 and moved into the private prison industry to become one of GEO Group’s Facility Administrators.
Hatcher now runs South Bay Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility, one of GEO Groups’ largest prisons which is about an hour north from where I grew up in South Florida. His job includes oversight of medical services, mental health programs, and detainee rights.
This guy who (allegedly) told an entire male housing unit about a trans woman’s sexual assault complaint. This guy is still in charge.
On the day Trump took office in 2025, he issued Executive Order 14168.
It directs the Bureau of Prisons to transfer trans women who were already in women’s prisons (and immigration detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, and other federally operated or federally funded facilities) to the men’s versions.
Eighteen trans women, the plaintiffs in Doe v. Blanche, sued. They’d already been individually assessed by the Bureau as suitable for women’s prison prior to the new executive order. The women had also been on hormones long term and some had undergone gender affirming surgeries.
They hadn’t been a threat in a women’s prison before, but they would certainly be in danger in a men’s prison now.
“The Trump policy contradicts the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which has for years required an individualized safety assessment for placement decisions because, as federal data demonstrates, transgender people in prison are sexually abused or assaulted at nearly 10x the rate of the general prison population,” the NCLR wrote.
Or as Ashley Diamond put it in her 2021 article, “They put a woman in a men’s prison. What did they think would happen?”
Thankfully, a few days ago on June 8th, a federal judge blocked the EO and issued a new injunction for continued protection for these women.
Without it, their experiences would undoubtedly mirror Diamond’s.
I won’t lie. The Bureau of Prison’s “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria” made my blood run cold. You’d think after all this time and everything I’ve seen over the last year that I’d be numb. To most of it, I am.
But reading this was one of the worst, most sinking feelings I’ve had thus far. It was genuine terror. It painted such a clear picture of the future.
There are ways to fight back and there are wins. But it’s been a long fight and it’s getting longer. This is what we’re up against, and it has to be put plainly.
The Trump administration can continue making more and more aspects of transness illegal. They can put more and more trans people in prison.
Once we’re there, they can do whatever they want to erase us.
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