Shaun Dawson (00:06.092)
Hey y’all, you’re tuned into Assigned Sex: Unarchived.

I’m your non-binary cousin, Shaun Dawson and this is a safe space where we’re honest about what it means to show up as Black, trans, and genderqueer.

Today I want to talk about a woman named Dee Farmer. You probably don't know her name. But you are living in the world her lawsuit helped build. In 1989, Dee was placed in a men's federal prison. She was beaten. She was raped. She sued the United States government. And in 1994, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, establishing a legal standard that said the government can’t knowingly put you in harm's way and call it justice.That ruling became the foundation for a federal law that protected transgender people in prison for over a decade.

Last week, a woman we’re not allowed to know by name (she goes by Paulina Poe in court documents) filed a lawsuit from inside a men's prison making the exact same argument Dee Farmer made thirty-one years ago. The protections Dee fought for should’ve covered Paulina, but a single memo was enough to wipe them out.

Let's get into it.

Dee Farmer (01:10.158)
Somebody had told me like the day before that these inmates were planning to rape me and I didn't believe them at first and then that night two inmates came in my cell when I had a knife and they started to beat me up and then they tore my clothes off of me. They put the knife to my throat.

Shaun Dawson (01:43.246)
Let me set the scene. In 1989, Dee Farmer was a Black transgender woman in federal custody. She presented as a woman in every visible way, and the Bureau of Prisons looked at her and sent her to a men's penitentiary in Oxford, Wisconsin.

Elizabeth Alexander (01:57.666)
The petitioner in this case is a transsexual. She is a young, nonviolent prisoner of feminine appearance and demeanor. Prior to her incarceration, she had undergone silicone breast injections and unsuccessful surgery to remove her testicles. She alleges that she was raped approximately 10 days after her placement in general population at the Terre Haute Penitentiary.

Shaun Dawson (02:23.416)
She was raped by another inmate within a few weeks and could see that nothing about the prison’s decisions was going to change on its own. She felt like the system saw her as disposable and didn’t care what happened to her. She decided to sue.

Dee Farmer (02:42.208)
I filed the suit when I was in Springfield. And what happened was I was in solitary confinement and the only thing I could do was go to the law library. And so I would go to the library almost every day and spend countless hours in there just reading books, law books, cases. And that's where I got the inspiration to file the lawsuit. And I filed it in Wisconsin and they only had two judges there and I knew that my case was going to go to Chabazz. And of course he dismissed it.

Shaun Dawson (03:20.248)
First, the lower courts threw out her case. They basically told Dee: “We’re not going to hold the prison responsible for what happened to you unless you can prove they already knew that a particular person was going to attack you and had that warning written down somewhere.” It wasn’t enough that it was obviously dangerous to put a transgender woman in a men’s prison.

Elizabeth Alexander (03:41.346)
Petitioner asks for an opportunity to prove that this placement in the general population at Terre Haute violated the Eighth Amendment because it was obvious to respondents that petitioner was at an unreasonable risk. What does obvious risk mean in the context of this case? Suppose we were making a list of people who would be at obvious risk of sexual assault if placed in a high security male prison. Women would be at the top of the list, surely, and the risk is so obvious that we cannot imagine a prison deciding to confine women in general population at a male high security facility. But also near the top of the list would be someone who had the appearance and demeanor of a woman, a transsexual like petitioner.

Shaun Dawson (04:22.626)
Dee appealed. Year after year, her case moved up through the system. The Supreme Court finally took her case in 1993, and Justice David Souter wrote the opinion that came back eight to zero. If a prison official knows an inmate faces a substantial risk of serious harm and disregards that risk, that is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. They called it deliberate indifference. Dee didn't walk out of that ruling with a public victory. Her case got sent back to the lower courts, it settled quietly, and she disappeared from the public record. The details of the settlement aren’t public and were likely kept confidential, so we don’t know what, if anything, she personally received. What we do know is that the legal standard she fought for now protects every incarcerated person in the United States.

George W. Bush (05:12.59)
As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our union has never been stronger.

Shaun Dawson (05:31.938)
The year is now 2003. George W. Bush is president, the country is at war, and somehow in the middle of all that, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, passes the United States Senate 99 to zero. Bush even signs it. I need you to sit with that. Not one senator voted against a law designed specifically to address what was happening to LGBTQ people in cages, in 2003, under a Republican president. PREA created a national commission that spent years studying sexual violence in prisons. They interviewed incarcerated people, corrections officers, and researchers, and what they found about transgender women was not a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention; Transgender women in male facilities weren't just at elevated risk. The data put them in their own category, far more likely to be sexually assaulted than anyone else in the general prison population, not because of who they were but because of where they were being placed.

Barack Obama (06:36.77)
We should not be tolerating overcrowding in prison. We should not be tolerating gang activity in prison. We should not be tolerating rape in prison. And we shouldn't be making jokes about it in our popular culture. That's no joke. These things are unacceptable.

Shaun Dawson (06:55.094)
In 2012 the Obama administration finalized the regulations that gave PREA actual teeth. Those regulations required an individualized safety assessment for every transgender person in custody, not anatomy-based housing but an actual case-by-case review of the real human being in front of you. They required transgender people to have a say in their own housing decisions, and they required independent auditors, outside inspectors certified by the DOJ, to go into facilities regularly and verify that all of this was actually happening. This took nearly a decade to build, it was passed under a Republican and implemented under a Democrat, and it was grounded in data that nobody in good faith could dispute. The floor Dee Farmer helped build, was finally written into federal law.

Donald Trump (07:45.39)
With my action this afternoon, we're putting every school receiving taxpayer dollars on notice that if you let men take over women's sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding. There will be no federal funding. I'm also directing our Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, to deny any and all visa applications made by men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying themselves as women athletes to try and get into the games. And last week, I effectively banned the chemical castration and surgical mutilation of minor children.

Shaun Dawson (08:29.216)
On January 20th, 2025, among the flurry of executive orders issued on day one of the second Trump administration, was one literally called: "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." This declared that the federal government would recognize only two sexes with no exceptions. For transgender women in federal custody, the immediate meaning was that you go to the men's facility with no assessment, no review of your history or documented risk, just anatomy. Organizations lawyered up fast, courts issued injunctions, and individual plaintiffs won temporary protections, but those wins were few.

Corey Booker (09:11.79)
21 years ago, Congress unanimously passed a bipartisan bill, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, also known as PREA. The bill was championed by a broad coalition that included evangelical Christians who were outraged by the epidemic of rape and sexual violence in prisons and organized together in an extraordinary way, evangelicals from all around the country, including my state, organized themselves to ensure that incarcerated people were treated with dignity, and protected while in custody.

Shaun Dawson (09:43.744)
Later, in December of 2025, something shady happened. The Department of Justice sent a memo to federal prisons, state prisons, jails, juvenile detention centers, and immigration facilities, telling PREA auditors to, stop evaluating whether facilities were following the protections for transgender and LGBTQ prisoners, and to mark those standards as "not applicable" on their audit reports. I want to point out that PREA was not repealed. The law had not changed and the regulations were still on the books exactly as they had been since 2012.

Shannon Minter (10:22.478)
I think this administration has decided to make one of its political goals to, as far as they're able to do so, make it impossible for transgender people legally and socially to live in this country. I think they really are under a kind of ideological grip that they can stamp out the transgender population. And that is a very frightening development. It's something we have never seen before.

Shaun Dawson (10:51.938)
Shannon Minter at NCLR explained that the administration was supposed to go through the official process of amending the regulations, a process that requires public notice and a comment period. But they skipped all of that and sent a memo instead. The auditors were the only independent oversight mechanism PREA ever created, the only people going into facilities with the authority to ask whether any of this was actually happening. And without them, the law is just words on paper.

Nandikayyy (11:21.358)
On May 6th, 2026, a federal lawsuit was filed in Washington D.C. challenging the legality of a Justice Department memo that suspended protections for transgender prisoners under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The plaintiff, using the pseudonym Paulina Poe, is a transgender woman currently incarcerated in a men’s facility. According to court documents, she has been propositioned, groped, sexually harassed, assaulted by other inmates, and strip-searched by male officers. The December 2nd, 2025 DOJ memorandum instructed federal auditors to stop evaluating whether prisons comply with PREA standards protecting transgender people, effectively suspending regulations without going through the required public rulemaking process.

The lawsuit argues this violates the Administrative Procedure Act and asks the court to restore full enforcement of PREA protections.

Shaun Dawson (12:23.534)
In the lawsuit, the plaintiff is named as “Paulina Poe.” That isn’t her real name; it’s the name she’s using to stay safe in a place where being the face of a big federal case against the Department of Justice could make her life even harder. What we do know is that she is a transgender woman currently incarcerated in a men's prison who filed this lawsuit on May 6th, 2026 in federal court in Washington D.C. The parallel to Dee Farmer is so close it almost doesn't feel real. Thirty-one years later; same argument to the same government: you know what happens to people like me in places like this, and you put me here anyway.

The legal theory in Poe v. DOJ is about process, not asking the court to rule on transgender rights broadly but asking whether a federal agency can suspend a law by sending a memo. The Administrative Procedure Act says no, there is a process, the government skipped it, and NCLR's legal director called the case open and shut. But even open and shut still takes time; and while it plays out in courtrooms, Paulina Poe is still in that prison, the auditors are still standing down, and the facilities are still operating under a memo that told them the rules don’t apply anymore.

There are about 2,198 transgender people in federal custody right now, and as of early 2025, only 22 of those transgender women were being housed in facilities that matched their gender identity. The federal government restructured its entire enforcement apparatus and invited years of federal litigation over 22 people. So when you hear this framed as a major crisis about prisons being overrun, understand what’s really happening. This was never a logistics problem and it was never about safety or order. It was about whether these women get to exist in the eyes of the law at all. We have always known what happens to transgender women in men's facilities. The data has said the same thing for decades, PREA was built on that research, and the people making these decisions have read it. So when they make the decision anyway, it’s not ignorance, it’s a choice. I recently saw in a Reddit forum someone say that for a certain kind of person, sexual assault in prison isn't a problem to be solved but a feature, and I think about that when I look at a memo that didn't repeal a law or invite any public scrutiny but just quietly told institutions they could look the other way.

Dee Farmer sued the federal government from inside a prison with no money or guarantee anyone was listening. She lost twice before she won, and the standard she established became the foundation for a law that passed without a single opposing vote. Thirty-one years later, a woman whose real name we may never know is making the same argument from the same kind of place. I want you to leave with more than just the outrage, though outrage is correct. I want you to carry Dee Farmer's name. She is not in the textbooks. She did not get a documentary. She did get a Supreme Court ruling that protected people she would never meet, while the world kept making her life hard in every way. Say her name.Dee Farmer.

Dee Farmer (15:29.634)
I'd like the people to know that the struggle for transgenderism is still very much alive and very much needed. Some of the changes that need to be made is with the transgender community itself and that the transgender community in prison very much need the support of the transgenders outside of the prison. Make them feel that they haven't been forgotten, you know, that a lot of them don't have any support.

Shaun Dawson (16:06.092)
Remember Paulina Poe's name even if it isn't really hers. Watch this case, because however it gets decided it’s going to tell us something true about who this country actually believes deserves to be safe

Shaun Dawson (16:24.182)
Alright y'all, that's all I got for today. If you'd like details on the archival audio featured in this episode, check out the show notes. If this episode dragged you a little bit, or if it hugged you a little bit, please share it with someone you love. You can find me, your non-binary cousin, Sean Dawson on all platforms, and I am S. Dawson. Y'all be safe out there.