Denmark’s Eastern High Court ruled on Wednesday, May 24th, that a Danish trans ‘woman’ inmate who changed his legal gender from male to female in 2015—but did not undergo a sex change operation—will be required to serve his prison sentence alongside biological males.
The court’s decision comes after the transgender inmate, a 62-year-old serving a sentence for aggravated rape among other things, brought a civil case against the Directorate of Correctional Services and Herstedvester Prison, claiming that having to serve time alongside biological men constitutes a civil rights violation, the Danish state-owned broadcaster TV 2 Nyheder reports.
In its ruling, the high court, whose decision was in line with the district court’s, stated that if the transgender inmate were to be transferred to a female prison he would pose a “not insignificant security risk for female inmates.”
Per Danish law, full-body examinations of inmates, sometimes referred to as strip searches, are required to be conducted by a person of the same sex.
The court, in its decision, however, stated that the inmate being “strip-searched by men” and being required to “provide a urine sample” under the supervision of male officers did not violate the law, citing that the reference to gender in the law should be “understood as the biological sex.”
It concluded that, although the inmate’s legal gender is indeed female, he is technically a biological male given that he has not undergone gender reassignment surgery and therefore physically appears as a man.
Furthermore, the high court, in its ruling, notes that there has been no violation of the inmate’s right to privacy as described in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It ruled that the inmate’s placement in the male prison ward was not due to a lack of legal recognition of the inmate’s legal gender, but was based on a security assessment, including the protection of the rights and freedoms of other inmates.
