What Are Your Rights?

Courts have over and over again affirmed the basic human rights of prisoners for receive medically necessary treatment but correctional institutions continue to ignore their legal responsibility.

Should transgender inmate have been denied vaginal stent, vibrator?
Indy Star
By Kristine Guerra
January 13, 2015

Christa Allen wasn't your typical inmate.

Back in 2002 — four years before she was sentenced to time in the Rockville Correctional Facility — Allen had undergone a male-to-female gender-reassignment surgery.

Shortly after she entered Rockville, Allen explained her medical situation to prison officials and doctors. Specifically, she informed them that the doctor who had performed the surgery had prescribed her a female hormone as well as a vaginal stent.

The stent was medically necessary, she said, to prevent closure and loss of tissue. Not using the stent, she told them, could result in medical complications that could require a second, costly surgery.
[…]
But prison officials and her prison medical doctors decided it was not medically necessary. The Indiana Department of Correction's medical director told her in a letter that although not using the stent could result in some complications, its use was not necessary to provide the basic and necessary health care given to prisoners.

She filed suit and the lower court dismissed the suit but an appeals court reversed the dismissal saying,

… In November, the Indiana Court of Appeals sided with her, saying there was no clear reason for preventing her from using the stent or the vibrator. More broadly, the appellate judges ruled that the standard of care for doctors should not be different regardless of where they're practicing.

I think of it as the “ick factor” for some reason correctional officials have no problem with cancer treatments and other medically necessary procedures but when it comes to providing medical care for us they raise their hands and back away.

This is not to say that if someone breaks a window and goes to prison for 30 days that they are automatically entitled to have Gender Confirming Surgery (GCS), but if they are incarcerated for a long time that they should have all medically necessary healthcare.