Transsexual Held in Men’s Jail Sues : Legal system: Inmate who has had a partial sex-change operation says she should be treated as a woman and moved to women’s jail. Sheriff’s official calls it a ‘difficult situation.’

A transsexual filed a $5-million suit Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, complaining that while she should be treated like a woman she is being forced to serve time in a men’s jail.

Jacqueline Farrell, 36, was born a male but has undergone a partial sex-change operation, and now considers herself a woman. She was booked into the Sybil Brand Institute for Women on July 2 after her arrest on suspicion of cocaine possession and stealing credit cards.

But when a medical examination two weeks later revealed that the operations she underwent 17 years ago had left her with partial male genitalia, she was transferred to a section of the Hall of Justice men’s jail reserved for homosexuals.

“It’s a rather difficult situation,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Alan Chancellor said at the time. “It’s a Catch-22.”

After Farrell protested the transfer, she was moved to an isolation unit, but she must still shower with male prisoners, according to her attorney, Charles Spagnola.

“She was assaulted in a shower by a male--she characterized it as a hate thing,” Spagnola said. “He started beating on her.”

The suit filed Wednesday demands Farrell’s immediate transfer back to a women’s facility, along with $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages from the Sheriff’s Department.

Spagnola said that Farrell underwent the initial phase of a sex-change operation in 1975, during which breasts were implanted and Farrell’s testicles were removed. But the second phase of the operation, during which the penis and scrotum were to have been removed and a vagina was to have been created, was never done.

“It was a money thing,” Spagnola said. “The last part is the most expensive.”

Since then, Farrell has considered herself a woman, taking female hormones to enhance her femininity.

She said she worked as a prostitute in New York before being arrested there several years ago on grand theft charges. Facing a prison sentence in New York, she filed a federal suit asking that she be treated as a woman.

Richard Maher, a lawyer who represented her in New York, said prison officials settled that case, stipulating in a court-approved settlement that Farrell would be treated as a woman any time she is in custody there.

Farrell was arrested here on suspicion of grand theft and cocaine possession on July 2 and spent the next two weeks at Sybil Brand. On July 15, however, she underwent the physicial examination and was transferred to the men’s jail.

On July 23, Farrell pleaded guilty to the grand-theft and cocaine-posession charges, and Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Albracht sentenced her to a year in custody. She is currently serving that sentence in the Hall of Justice isolation unit.

Spagnola said that in addition to being assaulted, Farrell has been denied many of the privileges customarily afforded the general inmate population.

“We believe that she should be with women,” said Lise Anderson, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who has been consulted on the case. “She feels like a woman. She looks like a woman.”