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A transgender inmate from Minnesota, named Christina Lusk, will be shifted to a women's prison, as well as receive $495,000 as a part of a lawsuit against the state corrections department while preparing to undergo vaginoplasty. In a historic move, 57-year-old Christina Lusk is set to be transferred to the women's facility in Shakopee next week.
This marks the first instance in Minnesota where an inmate is being relocated to a different prison based on their gender identity, as per FOX9.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections agreed to give Lusk a vaginoplasty as part of the settlement announced last week, as well as reform its policy surrounding transgender prisoners.
Last year, Lusk, who is currently serving a sentence until 2024 for a felony drug offense and was arrested in 2018, filed a complaint against the Minnesota Department of Corrections. The lawsuit was filed, in part, due to the department's deferral of Lusk's request for a vaginoplasty, commonly known as "bottom surgery."
The move has sparked an outrage online, with one of them commenting:
Twitter reacts to Christina Lusk's transfer to women's facility
After the news of Christina Lusk's transfer to a women's facility went viral, Twitterati was furious. Several users slammed the Minnesota Department of Corrections for the move, with one of them even commenting that they will "never set foot" in the state.
Others raised concerns about women present in the jail facility and feared for their safety, and dubbed it "ridiculous."
In 2009, Christina Lusk began her cross-s*x hormones and changed her name in 2018. She was in talks with the doctors about surgical options available for her before she got arrested.
According to a lawsuit, Lusk has filed a complaint with the Department of Corrections (DOC) after the department's medical director, James Amsterdam, reviewed her case and concluded that she should not be granted genital surgery while in custody. Amsterdam suggested that Lusk could consider the surgery after being released from prison.
The complaint was filed on Christina Lusk's behalf by the advocacy group Gender Justice, which alleged that the inmate was s*xually abused by other male prisoners. The legal director of Gender Justice, Jess Braverman said:
"Inmates would heckle her, heckle her roommates… call her ‘it,’ that sort of thing. And then there were staff who would say things to her, such as, 'You know, you're a man in a men's prison. I'm not going to treat you like a woman. I'm not going to use your proper name and pronouns.'"
In January 2023, the Minnesota Department of Corrections joined ten other states and the District of Columbia in enacting a policy that allows offenders to be relocated to institutions that correspond to their gender identification.
