Ashley Diamond

rdf:langString Ashley Diamond

rdf:langString Ashley Diamond

rdf:langString Ashley Diamond

rdf:langString Ashley Diamond (born 1978) is an American transgender civil-rights activist and convicted criminal who sued the Georgia Department of Corrections twice for housing her with male inmates and refusing to provide medical treatment she'd been receiving since she was a teenager. Diamond was imprisoned in 2012 for a nonviolent offense and held in a men's facility. While in prison she was denied medically necessary hormones she had been taking for over seventeen years, was beaten and sexually assaulted by inmates with no help from prison guards. From inside the prison, Diamond partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to file a lawsuit against the Georgia Department of Corrections, settling for an undisclosed amount. In 2015 Diamond was released on parole and in 2016 received a settlement in the lawsuit, and the Georgia Department of Corrections changed its medical treatment policy for transgender prisoners. The US Department of Justice became involved, saying that prisons must treat hormone therapy as they would any other medical condition. Beth Litrell of the SPLC attributed the change to Diamond's lawsuit. In 2019, Georgia adopted a new policy governing the treatment of transgender and intersex prisoners that according to The New York Times was intended to address prisoner safety issues, including assessing placement decisions using input on the prisoner's own views of their safety, and to reassess placements after sexual assault. In October 2019, Diamond was again arrested and imprisoned on parole violation charges. She was again placed in a men's facility. According to Diamond, by November 2020 she had been sexually assaulted fourteen times by other inmates and prison staff and had been denied hormone treatment therapy. On November 23, 2020, Diamond, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the SPLC filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.