A trans-identified male inmate serving three life sentences for crimes against women has filed a discrimination lawsuit in an attempt to be transferred into the general population among female prisoners. Thomas Preston Lamb, also known as Michelle Renee Lamb, is currently detained in a women’s facility in Topeka, Kansas, but has been kept separate from the female inmates — an arrangement Lamb deems unacceptable.
Lamb wrote. “I’m being treated as if I’m public enemy number one here at TCF, being escorted by two officers all the time. I feel miserable and wake up crying at night. I’m denied the most basic need, especially for us females: the need to have close contact and relationships with other females.”
Prison officials also noted that Lamb had already been allowed multiple exceptions to housing rules, including permission to buy makeup and earrings. Since claiming a female identity in 2006, Lamb has been provided with “female undergarments” by the Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC) while incarcerated, with the intimate clothing described as “therapeutic for Lamb’s gender dysphoria.” He has also been provided with estrogen and testosterone-blocking drugs.
Leading up to his November lawsuit, Lamb had been threatening prison officials in an attempt to increase his access to the female prison population.
Lamb, who is described as “female” in the state Criminal Justice Information System and referred to as a “transgender female” in court records, was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Karen Sue Kemmerly, a 24 year-old student at the University of Kansas-Missouri, around December 5, 1969.
Lamb murdered Kemmerly after she commented he was a “handsome man,” and told him he was “very capable sexually,” which sent him into a violent rage as he saw himself as a woman. Lamb strangled the woman to death, and left her nude corpse in a cornfield. The young student’s body was found approximately five days after her death on December 7.
This is a clear indication that the world has gone mad – yet confirmation that women do not count, our safety is irrelevant, that men are pre-eminent in the world, even in terms of the men whom a patriachal system (one that favours men over women) labels its ‘worst’. That this law suit can even be contemplated, much less taken seriously by the legal system and the prison system is an indication of how far we have to go before women are seen as truly human with women’s rights being human rights and human rights being women’s rights.