By Bruce Vielmetti
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MILWAUKEE, Wis. — A 23-year-old transgender inmate at Wisconsin’s maximum security prison has sued officials there, claiming they’re violating the inmate’s rights by not allowing her to live as a woman.
Dominique Gulley, also known as Teriyaki Ariana Daniels-Wilds, describes herself as from several ethnic backgrounds and having identified as female since she was 8.
Gulley was 15 when she struck and seriously injured a Dane County sheriff’s deputy while driving a stolen car in 2008. After she stole another car in 2010, her probation was revoked and she was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The injured deputy later sued the juvenile group home where Gulley was living in 2008 when she stole the car that hit the deputy. The case was settled.
The handwritten federal lawsuit says Gulley has been in and out of a dozen mental health treatment centers and programs for a long list of conditions, including bipolar, post traumatic stress and gender identity disorders, and has more than a dozen medications prescribed.
At least two of Gulley’s prior federal lawsuits over her care in prison have been dismissed for technical reasons.
Gulley claims she was misdiagnosed by Department of Corrections doctors in 2011 and sent to the Secure Program Facility in Boscobel. Department records show she had been in and out Boscobel and other locations.
She contends that officials will not allow her to continue the hormone treatments that she had begun six years before being incarcerated, the first steps toward the sex-change surgery that she wants to complete a gender transformation. Wisconsin has denied sex-change surgery to an inmate in the past, but California this week agreed to provide it for an inmate there, a first in the nation.
The suit further claims that a doctor’s failure to diagnose gender identity disorder in 2013 was negligent and deliberately indifferent and led to Gulley’s continued mental and emotional pain and suffering.
Another evaluation this summer concluded Gulley should see a gender identity disorder specialist, according to the lawsuit, which doesn’t say if that occurred or what diagnosis resulted.
Gulley says she has repeatedly been denied requests to transfer to prisons in Racine or Oshkosh where she says there are many more LGBT inmates, including those on hormone therapy.
Asked to comment on the suit, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Joy Staab said, “Inmates who report gender dysphoria are evaluated by psychology staff and referred to medical treatment as appropriate.”