Sarah Jane Baker prison treatment ‘amounts to medical detransition’
Sarah Jane Baker was found not guilty of inciting violence over her ‘punch TERFs’ Trans+ Pride speech. (Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Jailed trans woman Sarah Jane Baker has allegedly had her hormones stopped by a prison doctor, according to an activism campaign.
The Free Sarah Jane Baker campaign (FSJB) has alleged that the trans activist and artist is being denied oestrogen – a feminising hormone used as part of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) – by healthcare physicians in prison.
Furthermore, the campaign claims that, after being transferred to a jail in the Isle of Wight, prison doctors have proposed to administer her with testosterone, which FSJB says “amounts to a medical detransition”.
“Sarah is suffering severe menopausal symptoms now her oestrogen has been stopped,” the campaign statement reads. “The only treatment she is being offered to manage this is testosterone, at a dose that would give her the same level as if she still had testes.”
While previously incarcerated, Baker was given oestrogen on the advice of gender specialists after she castrated herself. The dose was continued by her GP after her release in 2019.
She was arrested in early July and re-imprisoned under parole violation after giving a speech at the London Trans+ Pride event where she said: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the f**king face.”
The Metropolitan Police initially refused to investigate the matter, saying that the call to violence was hypothetical, but eventually arrested her under incitement to violence laws.
Despite being found not guilty in August, Baker remains in prison at the time of reporting.
She is currently being held at the HMP Isle of Wight – a high-security men’s prison with over 1,000 prisoners across two sites, many of whom are sex offenders.
FSJB called the decision to move her “yet another punitive and transphobic measure being taken [against] someone who was not even found guilty of the crime that has had her recalled”.
According to the news organisation Worker’s Liberty, the gender identity clinic has allegedly written to her saying that her prison doctor is refusing to prescribe her anything but full-dose testosterone despite what the GIC is advising.
However, a spokesperson for the private practice which provides the prison doctor service, said in a statement that Sarah Jane Baker’s current treatment is a “temporary measure while the healthcare team fulfils their duty of care to ensure that the benefits of any drugs we prescribe outweigh any risks”.
They spokesperson continued: “We are fully committed to providing appropriate care for trans patients.”
