Attorneys for the federal prison system agreed last week to pay $95,000 to a transgender woman who had alleged in dozens of lawsuits that she had been abused and mistreated in its custody by both fellow prisoners and staff. The agreement to settle the suits was signed just days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who had campaigned on a promise to end federal accommodations and support for trans people.
Grace Pinson was featured in a story published by The Marshall Project, Mother Jones and Arizona Luminaria about the dangers of life in federal prison for transgender women. The story recounted how Pinson sued the Bureau of Prisons after she was brutally beaten by her cellmate. Prison officials had locked her in a cell with no emergency alarm with a man serving time for sexual assault.
A dogged and effective jailhouse lawyer, Pinson brought that case and another against the Bureau of Prisons to trial last year and won them both without an attorney or any formal legal training. In both cases a judge placed blame on the bureau and its employees for Pinson being harmed unnecessarily. Now, as part of this settlement, Pinson will drop at least 13 additional cases that argued that the prison system had denied her gender-affirming care and had failed to keep her safe, among other allegations.
As part of one case about her gender-affirming care, Pinson had argued that by treating her as a man, the Bureau of Prison’s risk assessments classified her as more dangerous than she was, which landed her in higher-security, more violent prisons. A judge ruled in September that the bureau should make housing decisions about her using the same security metrics that they use for women; several other aspects of the case were ongoing.
After fighting that case on her own for two years, a judge appointed Pinson a pro bono attorney, who helped negotiate the settlement with the government that was signed last week — just in time to avoid having to negotiate with the incoming Trump administration, her lawyer said. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order targeting trangender people and ordered the Bureau of Prisons to not spend federal funds for gender-affirming care.
The Bureau of Prisons did not reply to a request for a comment on Pinson’s cases and the settlement.
Lisa Bivens, Pinson’s appointed attorney, said that although the settlement would require Pinson to drop the case, the ruling about her housing status still stands for other trans women to draw on in future cases. This is gratifying, she said, because Pinson used precedents set by earlier generations of trans women in court to build many of her arguments. Now, “we have left pretty good breadcrumbs in the public domain for others to follow.”
After the bureau recalculated Pinson’s security risk as the judge had ordered, she was transferred from a high-security men’s prison to a medium-security men’s prison. Almost immediately after her arrival, she was placed in 23-hour-a-day isolation. In a legal filing, Pinson wrote that the prison she was sent to — FCI El Reno in Oklahoma — is “allegedly known for its anti-LGBTQ+ gangs and culture,” and the warden said she needed to be held in isolation “for her own protection.” In the special housing unit there, she has no access to the bureau’s online messaging system and receives just a few minutes per month for phone calls.
Last year, a federal judge awarded her $10,000 in the case regarding the beating she suffered from her cellmate. According to Bivens, that money was taken by the federal prison system as soon as it hit her account to pay outstanding legal, copying and postage fees. The money from the new settlement will go into a trust fund that Bivens’ firm, Zwillinger Wulkan, set up for Pinson. The money could be used toward gender-affirming surgery and a nest egg for a new life when she gets out of prison. Her 21-year federal prison sentence is scheduled to end in 2026.
