A trans woman in Texas could become the first to receive gender affirming surgery while serving her sentence in a federal prison. Cristina Nichole Iglesias, 47, has been petitioning the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to get the surgery since 2016. She was always denied until last month, when the Obama-appointed federal judge Nancy Rosenstengel ordered the BOP to reconsider Iglesias’s case, citing concerns for her mental health and safety.
Iglesias is serving the last of a 20-year sentence for sending threats to the British government when she was 19 years old (threats of this nature can be, in some cases, considered a violent crime depending on how likely it is for a person to carry it out). During the past several years, she was placed in all-male prisons where she experienced violence and threats to her life, according to the ACLU.
