Transgender policies make cross-sex prison transfers a breeze

In 2008, 19-year-old Bryan Kim was sentenced to life in a Washington state prison for murdering his parents. Nine years later, in 2017, while housed at the Monroe Correctional Complex outside Seattle, he legally changed his name to Amber Fayefox Kim and his gender marker on legal documents to “female.” Kim received approval for cross-sex hormone treatment and asked to be housed with women.

In 2021, Kim got his wish and was shipped to the Washington Corrections Center for Women, the largest female-only prison in the state. But this past June, three years into his stay, he was caught engaging in sex with a female inmate and subsequently sent back to Monroe.

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington announced it’s suing the state to send Kim back to the women’s facility. The group said in a press release that it was unfair to “[force] her to live in a men’s prison that does not align with her gender identity and that places her at imminent risk of harm.”

If the ACLU gets its way, Kim would be the first inmate in the state to be placed in a men’s facility, then a women’s, then a men’s and then back to a women’s.

Kim is one of several male inmates in Washington state who have successfully convinced corrections staff that they should be housed in a women’s setting. And he likely won’t be the last. Among states that report their numbers of transgender-identifying prisoners, most have fewer than five male inmates housed in women’s prisons, but the numbers are climbing in states with permissive transgender housing policies. California, for example, has 52 male inmates in female housing, based on research by Women’s Declaration International and Keep Prisons Single Sex.

Back in Washington, some prison and jail staffers say the state makes it easy for a man to request a transfer to a women’s prison. All he has to do is say he’s female.

A former charge nurse in Jail Health Services, a division of the Seattle-area King County Public Health, explained the process to WORLD. The nurse uses the pseudonym Olivia, and WORLD agreed to withhold her real name because of concerns for her job and safety.

Olivia said that a male inmate’s declaration that he is transgender triggers a meeting with the county jail’s transgender review committee, which includes corrections staff and members of the jail’s psychiatric and medical team. Within a matter of days, the group makes a determination over where best to house the inmate. That could include a special medical or psychiatric unit—or female-only housing.

According to the 2022 general policy manual for King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention Divisions, an inmate does not need a legal name change or a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Instead, the committee makes a housing decision based on concerns for the inmate’s safety, personal preferences, his original offense, history of victimizing others, and other factors.

The document notes that, “a decision about housing will be made under the presumption that the inmate will be housed in accordance with their gender identity.”

I reached out to the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention to confirm the housing guidelines for inmates who identify as transgender, but they did not provide a response in time for publication.

While still working for King County, Olivia raised concerns with her management that the policy would potentially risk the safety of female inmates, but she said she was rebuffed. “It wasn’t until the conversation was shut down by [King] County leaders, that I sought out other avenues and audiences,” she told WORLD in an email. She resigned in 2023.

WORLD independently confirmed with the Department of Public Health of Seattle and King County that a person with Olivia’s true name was employed by Jail Health between December 2017 and March 2023.

The nonprofit Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, also known as FAIR, published Olivia’s story last week in its newsletter. Leigh Ann O’Neill, the foundation’s managing director of legal advocacy, said Olivia’s experience prompted the organization to scrutinize transgender policies across Washington. It focused on the state’s prison system since its population is more stable than that of jails, where the population can change every day.

The group’s research found that, like the state’s jails, Washington state prisons also had permissive transgender housing policies.

In 2021, an anonymous prison staff member told a Seattle radio show that a male inmate raped a female inmate shortly after being transferred to the Washington Corrections Center for Women, the same facility that once housed Bryan Kim.

WORLD used the state inmate registry to look up the names of male inmates believed to have been housed at the facility. Olivia and other activists have verified that at least 12 males reside at the female-only institution.

That includes Douglas Perry, a male who now goes by Donna Perry. In 2017, Perry was sentenced to three life sentences for murdering three female prostitutes in 1990. According to a 2014 ABC News article, Perry underwent sex change surgery in 2000. By the time he was sent to prison, Douglas had changed his name to Donna and his legally listed sex to female.

WORLD reached out to the Washington Department of Corrections, and it confirmed that 284 transgender inmates are housed throughout the state’s 11 prisons. The department added that at any given time, 10-12 of those are in what the department terms “gender-affirming housing.”

“If a person identifies as transgender or nonbinary, they participate in a thorough mental health assessment, healthcare assessment, and facility evaluation,” department spokesman Christopher Wright said in an emailed statement. He added that “several multidisciplinary teams” consider requests “on a case-by-case basis, with a focus on safety both for the individual and those who are housed at the facility.”

When asked if any males reside in the Washington Corrections Center for Women, Wright responded, “No, there are transgender individuals housed at WCCW.”

O’Neill said that FAIR requested meetings with leaders within Washington state’s Department of Corrections, which controls the state’s prisons. Department of Corrections leadership acknowledged the concerns, but O’Neill said the meetings were not productive.

Last month, FAIR filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, accusing Washington state’s Department of Corrections of sex-based discrimination. O’Neill said the corrections leadership has not yet responded to a request for another meeting.

O’Neill said she’s concerned for the safety of female inmates, who are generally physically weaker than males and vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse. She says the vast majority of female inmates have experienced rape or sexual violence at the hands of men prior to incarceration.

“The presence of males, no matter how the male acts, is deeply traumatizing to the female inmates,” O’Neill said. “They’re really being subjected to re-traumatization and psychological harm on an ongoing basis.”

In addition to her concern for women, O’Neill said her organization also wants to uphold objective truth.

“Terms are now being changed and in some cases, made interchangeable,” she said. “The most obvious one on point here is that a man can become a woman, or that a woman somehow can mean a male who identifies as a woman. FAIR is dedicated to upholding the fact that the biological truth of the sex binary is real.”

But Washington state lawmakers and the ACLU have made objective truth harder to find.

In 2021, the ACLU of Washington sued—and won in 2023—to withhold the gender identity of inmates from the public. This means prison officials, watchdogs, and the media may not know the actual sex of an inmate, especially if he decides to legally change his sex, as Bryan Kim and Douglas Perry did. Both men are currently listed in official prison records as females. Looking up their birth names in the inmate lookup does not turn up any records—nor even any evidence that they ever identified as male.

In 2023, Keep Prisons Single Sex sent FOIA requests to each state to determine the number of male prisoners residing in female spaces, and vice versa. But officials in Washington state declined to answer, citing the 2023 settlement.

Advocates who support sex-segregated prisons differ on the appropriate accommodations for inmates with a gender dysphoria diagnosis. But they agree that Washington state needs to introduce stiffer regulations to keep opportunistic males from accessing female settings.

“The current system is dangerous and does nothing to protect actual trans women or females from predation,” Olivia told WORLD in an email, “since any male can identify as transgender with nothing more than his word.”

Editor’s note: WORLD has updated this article to reflect a higher verified number of male inmates in women’s prison in Washington state.