A trans-identified male convicted of rape and child sexual abuse has been transferred to a women’s federal prison after launching a lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons claiming “discrimination.” July Justine Shelby, born William McClain, was convicted on multiple counts of child pornography trafficking after being caught distributing photos of infants being sexually abused.
Shelby was initially arrested in November of 2016 in Indianapolis, Indiana, after being linked to a cellphone found to contain graphic images of child rape. Shelby had been sending the images to another man later identified as a romantic interest of Shelby’s named Beau Thornburgh.
Shelby had met Thornburgh while in prison, and the two had developed a relationship over the course of their 12 years incarcerated together.
Thornburgh was arrested first, and a forensic examination of his devices found a number of communications with Shelby, who appeared to be supplying him with child sexual abuse images. Among the images traced to Shelby was a photo of an adult male sexually abusing an infant, and graphic images of a prepubescent girl.
When arrested, Shelby was on parole for rape and child molestation, and was not permitted to own a device which had access to the internet.
He was also subjected to GPS monitoring, which was quickly analyzed and used as additional evidence to connect him to Thornburgh, with Shelby appearing to regularly visit the other man’s residence. Thornburgh was also a registered sex offender at the time.
Shelby, who already identified as transgender at the time, was sentenced to 180 months in federal prison on charges of child pornography distribution and sent to Otisville FCI — a medium security institution for male offenders in New York.
He quickly began to present obstacles to his sentence, almost immediately filing a petition to have his conviction vacated after alleging his counsel had been “ineffective.” The court dismissed his motion, noting that he failed to demonstrate any evidence of the claim.
In 2020, Shelby filed a handwritten emergency writ of habeas corpus, claiming that his life was at risk in a men’s institution.
In the document, Shelby claimed multiple constitutional grievances, including that his First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights were being violated on the basis of his gender identity.
In November of 2022, a Southern District of New York court granted Shelby’s writ, and ordered the Bureau of Prisons to expedite Shelby’s transfer to a women’s prison. Soon after, Shelby was transferred to FMC Carswell, a female federal correctional facility in Texas.
Despite having been moved to a women’s prison, Shelby has continued to pursue legal action and demand various remedies. Among his new complaints are that he has been housed with the “worst of the worst” female offenders, and that his risk classification has been set too high.
In an April 2023 complaint, Shelby stated that the females on his unit have “made it clear” that he was not welcome at the facility, and that he lived in “fear” of being attacked by the “violent females” he was being housed with.
Shelby’s transfer appears to be the result of the Biden administration’s attempt to restore Obama-era guidelines surrounding the housing and treatment of transgender offenders in the federal system.
In January of 2022, the Bureau of Prisons re-issued its Transgender Offender Manual, which included guidelines previously scrubbed by the Trump administration with respect to gender self-identification for federal inmates. Under Trump, housing was based on biological sex alone, but the Biden policies re-invoked Obama-era guidelines which make a transgender inmate’s “personal safety” a priority.
The guidelines also stated that ‘misgendering’ is expressly forbidden, and that taxpayers must subsidize cosmetic surgeries, sex hormones, and brassieres for men who claim to identify as transgender.
According to Keep Prisons Single Sex USA, there are approximately 1,980 transgender offenders in the federal system, of which 1,295 are trans-identified males. Of them, almost 50% are in custody for sex offenses. This is compared to just 12% of the general federal inmate population, meaning that trans-identified males are incarcerated for sex offenses at a rate of almost four times that of non-transgender inmates.
Between 2022 and 2023, there was an almost 23% increase of federal inmates who identified as transgender.
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