30-D-2. Disclosure of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity as Fourteenth Amendment Violation
The Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy regarding disclosure of certain personal information.60 These holdings come out of a Supreme Court tradition of finding a general right to privacy in the Constitution that protects certain intimate matters.61 Further, many other courts have also found that a constitutional right of privacy protects against disclosure of some kinds of personal information.62 If a prison official discloses private information about you, you could be subject to harassment or abuse by other officials or fellow prisoners. If this has happened to you, you might be able to bring a claim under Section 1983 against the official who made the disclosure for violating your constitutional right to privacy. While many cases have focused on the disclosure of medical information, you might be able to bring a similar claim for unwarranted disclosure of other personal information.
(a) Privacy Regarding Gender Identity
The Second Circuit has found that a person's transgender status is among those constitutionally protected personal matters, and that a prison official may not violate a prisoner's right to privacy through disclosure of gender identity when that disclosure is not "reasonably related to legitimate penological interests."63 In other words, the prison official must have a legitimate reason, related to the prison system's goals, for giving away such private information.
Because it is hard to imagine a situation in which a prison could claim a legitimate interest in "outing" a transgender prisoner, you might succeed if you bring a Section 1983 claim arguing that a prison official who told others that you were transgender violated your right to privacy. In Powell v. Schriver, a transgender prisoner argued that a corrections officer had violated her constitutional right to privacy when the officer told another corrections officer in the presence of other prison staff and prisoners that she had undergone gender reassignment surgery. The Second Circuit held the corrections officer's "gratuitous disclosure" of the prisoner's "confidential medical information as humor or gossip ... [was] not reasonably related to a legitimate penological...
