A trans-identified male currently housed in a federal women’s prison admitted to filing false rape accusations against female inmates.
Cristina Nichole Iglesias, also known as Cristian Noel Iglesias and Kenneth R. West, is currently serving a 240 month sentence for threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction against officials at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London in 2002.
In July of 2002, while incarcerated in the Federal Detention Center in Miami, Florida, Iglesias mailed a letter addressed to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, the British counterpart of the United States Department of State.
The letter contained death threats and a powdery substance claimed to be Anthrax. The receipt of the letter in London caused significant disruption at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was subsequently evacuated. After forensic tests, Iglesias was connected to the crime, and was charged with one count of threatened use of a weapon of mass destruction, to which he pled guilty.
Iglesias committed the offence while imprisoned for the similar crime of threatening to commit an act of terrorism, which he committed in 1997, and had previously committed the same offense and was jailed on yet another occasion in 1994.
At some point during his incarceration, Iglesias began identifying as a woman, and demanded transfer to a women’s facility. With the help of an ACLU lawsuit, Iglesias was ultimately transferred to the Carswell Federal Medical Center, a women’s institution in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2021 where the Bureau of Prisons now lists him as a female inmate.
Iglesias was also then provided access to makeup, panties, bras, and other “gender dysphoria” alleviating accessories after being diagnosed. The diagnosis was complete after a total of two hours and thirty minutes of “assessments” by a doctor from The World Professional Association for Transgender Health conducted over four months.
The ACLU also began assisting Iglesias with his demand for gender reassignment surgeries prior to his slated release date.
In December of 2021, a federal judge ordered the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ Transgender Executive Council to evaluate Iglesias for the surgeries, marking the first time a judge had issued such an order on behalf of an inmate in federal custody. Iglesias was ultimately approved for the surgery, but a court filing is raising some eyebrows regarding Iglesias’ behavior while in custody.
As first reported by feminist activist Jennifer Gingrich, a December 27 court filing notes that Iglesias had admitted to submitting multiple false Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) against two female inmates in the institution in an attempt to front-run the sexual assault claims they were allegedly in the process of filing against him.
“Iglesias testified [he] filed the PREA complaint because [he] felt the two women were plotting to file their own false PREA lawsuits against [him] …”
The details of the women’s claims are not currently known, though they were dismissed as “false” in a testimony Iglesias gave at the time. Court documents also note Iglesias had then made a demand to be returned to a male facility.
Iglesias ultimately retracted his request for a transfer, but the Bureau of Prisons has stated that two other trans-identified male federal inmates have similarly voluntarily moved back to male prisons after becoming disinterested with staying in a women’s facility. Instances of trans-identified male inmates choosing to move back to men’s prisons have also occurred on the state level in the past.
Currently, Iglesias is slated for a move to another women’s institution in March, the location of which is in Florida. He, along with ACLU representatives, are currently claiming the Bureau of Prisons is unduly delaying his gender reassignment surgeries in an attempt to “run out the clock” prior to Iglesias’ December 2022 release date.
There are currently 1,500 federal inmates who identify as transgender. According to Keep Prisons Single Sex USA, almost 50% of trans-identified male federal inmates are in custody for sex offences. This is compared to just 11% of the non-trans male federal inmate population.
On January 13, the Biden administration restored Obama-era guidelines with respect to the housing and treatment of transgender criminals in the federal system, which claimed to place the trans inmate’s personal safety and comfort as a priority.
