The Kansas City Star has published a glowing profile on a transgender inmate convicted of operating a multi-state sex trafficking ring, praising his “fight for rights” while incarcerated at a Kansas prison. Ayana Satyagrahi, formerly known as Marcus Choice Williams, is serving 30 years in a federal institution for his crimes against women.
Written by journalist Katie Pierce, the piece opens by describing Satyagrahi’s childhood fascination with his sister’s clothing.
“Ayana Satyagrahi was five when she found herself playing in her bedroom closet and putting on her younger sister’s yellow sundress. Now 49, she lives in a cell at the men’s prison in Leavenworth not much larger than that closet,” the article begins, noting that “Satyagrahi is one of an estimated 2,170 transgender people under the supervision of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.”
The vast majority of the article is dedicated to Satyagrahi’s claimed struggles as he is incarcerated in a men’s prison, with Satyagrahi claiming that that the Bureau of Prisons is “hostile” towards transgender inmates.
Just one line is dedicated to Satyagrahi’s crimes, with Pierce writing that he was “sentenced to 30 years in a sex trafficking case,” and later dismissing Satyagrahi’s crimes as “recruiting women into sex work.”
But court records and Department of Justice releases paint a drastically different picture of Satyagrahi’s crimes, revealing that he was a violent pimp who targeted the most vulnerable women and trapped them the sex trade using violence.
According to a 2011 release by the FBI, Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas E. Perez said that Satyagrahi’s exploitation of vulnerable women through sex trafficking was the equivalent of “modern-day slavery.”
Beginning in 2003, Satyagrahi began operating as a pimp in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In 2006, he expanded his operations into a multi-state sex trafficking enterprise, operating “escorting” websites and facilitating the sexual purchase of women.
Satyagrahi would specifically target vulnerable women, specifically single mothers from troubled backgrounds, and, in some cases, he used a combination of deception, fraud, coercion, threats and physical violence to keep the women under his control. The FBI release emphasized that the victims “suffered physical assaults, sexual abuse, and daily degradation,” and that Satyagrahi had a “callous disregard for them as individuals.”
Satyagrahi required each woman to meet a daily “quota,” giving him all of the money they collected. While Satyagrahi prostituted numerous women over the years, five sex trafficking victims were named in his 2011 indictment, all of whom were single mothers of small children.
In 2020, Satyagrahi filed a Writ of Habeas Corpus, seeking relief after being punished for threatening a correctional officer during an altercation over “gender affirming” clothing items while incarcerated at USP Marion. According to the complaint, Satyagrahi had been given male boxers rather than feminine undergarments as he had requested, and lashed out at a correctional officer as a result.
According to the officer, Satyagrahi said: “you ain’t gonna’ do nothing for me you fuckin’ pussy. When I get out of [special housing] I’m gonna’ whoop your ass you fuckin’ cracker.’” Satyagrahi was written up for abusive language as a result, and lost some privileges after a disciplinary hearing found him guilty of the infraction.
The Kansas City Star article notes that Satyagrahi has launched a “Transgender Accessible Prisons Initiative,” advocating for trans-identified male inmates to have pat downs conducted by female officers or a body scanner, the option for single-cell housing, and the creation of a transgender-only recreation yard.
As noted by the Kansas City Star article, Satyagrahi is one of over 2,000 transgender people in federal custody, 1,295 of whom are males who identify as “women.” Of them, just over 47% were incarcerated for sex offenses.
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 state that “misgendering” is expressly forbidden, and that taxpayers must subsidize cosmetic surgeries, sex hormones, and brassieres for men who claim to identify as transgender.
While housing decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, with a Transgender Executive Council reviewing decisions every few months, extremely violent trans-identified males have successfully been transferred to women’s federal prisons after logging civil rights complaints.
As previously reported by Reduxx, a trans-identified male convicted of rape and child sexual abuse was 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.
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