FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Katelyn McGraw is currently incarcerated in Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, serving a sentence for possession of narcotic drugs and bail jumping. She’s been at Taycheedah since the end of summer 2023, records show, and her fiancee says that she’ll soon be sent to a minimum security prison.
Recently she began sending distressed messages to her fiancee, Raymond Slater II, describing a transgender prisoner named “Mark Campbell” with whom she shares both a cell and a bunkbed. McGraw expressed extreme anxiety as she described her cellmate’s constant masturbating, sexual comments, and aggressive behavior, and she asked her fiancee to find out what exactly got Campbell locked up.
“I’m just sooooo extra stressed out with this weirdo under me,” she wrote in one message to Slater, shared with The Daily Signal, which Slater believes was sent in mid February. He communicates with her through CorrLinks, a platform for people to message their incarcerated loved ones, but said that prison guards will often hold up the messages from being sent or received in a timely manner.
“What did he/she do?!?” she questioned her fiancee. “Mark Campbell?! Goodnight babyyyyy, ILY [I love you].”
Her concerned fiancee quickly turned to the internet to discover who this prisoner was. To his horror, he stumbled upon The Daily Signal’s reporting from September 2023, a report that revealed Campbell to be a man who now identifies as a woman, who raped his own daughter, and is a registered sex offender convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child.
Since Campbell identifies as transgender, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections has housed him in a women’s prison, Taycheedah Correctional Institution, since August 2022.
‘Anything Is Better Than a Cell With Him’
McGraw also spoke to The Daily Signal through a CorrLinks message, sharing that she was moved to the correctional facility’s psychiatric services unit, called “Monarch,” sometime earlier this month. DOC has not responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment for this story, including a request for an interview with Campbell, and questions about whether Campbell is now housed with other female inmates.
“They moved me to Monarch because they believe Campbell over me,” she said in the message, delivered to The Daily Signal on Feb. 19. “He told them I’m delusional cuz I said he was masturbating all the [time] which he was…and they told me if I refuse Monarch I’ll go to [segregation].”
“Anything is better than a cell with him,” she added. “He [asked] me when he first moved in if I have any friends cuz they’re gonna be curious if I [have] seen his vagina cuz it looks great and the surgeon did an amazing job and how its fresher than ours.”
McGraw expressed herself disgusted and “traumatized” with Campbell’s alleged proposition.
“I don’t wanna see nobody’s privates,” she wrote. “Yuckkkkk. Also he told me he don’t have a clit or can’t cum, I said I don’t care, I don’t wanna knowwwwww.”
The female prisoner is 31 years old, standing at only five feet and two inches tall, and weighing 150 pounds, prison records show. According to her fiancee, she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her father, who taught her to use drugs when she was a little girl “so that he could start abusing her.”
She has lived a very hard, very rough life, Slater said, and has been in and out of prison since 2017. But this is the first time that she has complained about the treatment she received from both the guards and the other inmates, he insisted.
When he spoke with The Daily Signal, before his fiancee was moved, he said he was terrified that Campbell will sexually assault her and beat her, and that the guards won’t do anything about it.
“It’s all very heartbreaking to me,” he said in emotional text messages to The Daily Signal.
Mark Campbell, Child Rapist
Campbell is 52 years old, five foot nine inches, and 225 pounds. His prison photos depict him with long hair and wearing makeup, including eyeliner, eyeshadow and blush.
Court documents allege that Campbell would sexually assault his daughter while her little brother was home and that “her little brother would sometimes come into the room while the sexual assault was occurring.”
“I can’t believe that the people in charge there decided to put her in the same cell as a man that raped his 10-year-old daughter knowing Katie’s background,” Slater said.
Campbell first requested transgender surgery to attempt to become a woman in 2013, according to a Wisconsin outlet, but the DOC denied his request at the time. In 2016 he filed a lawsuit accusing Department of Corrections officials of being indifferent to his medical needs by not allowing him to get so-called sex change surgery, the publication reported.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that the DOC officials couldn’t have anticipated that denying such a surgery to Campbell would violate his rights.
However, in December 2020, a federal judge ruled that Wisconsin must offer Campbell taxpayer-funded transition surgery and must move him to a women’s prison while awaiting that surgery.
The DOC housed Campbell in men’s prisons until August 2022, according to the inmate locator. In August 2022, authorities moved him to Taycheedah Correctional Institution, which “provides female inmates with a safe and secure environment that is gender-responsive,” according to the prison’s website.
Bunking With a Man
In messages shared with The Daily Signal, McGraw described a stressful and unhappy existence in prison, where other prisoners appeared to avoid her because she smelled and her guards didn’t believe her when she complained about Campbell. According to McGraw’s messages to Slater, Campbell shared a bunk bed with McGraw, and she frequently was forced to listen to him masturbating below her.
McGraw said that when she asked Campbell to stop, saying that his actions were disgusting, Campbell “went crazy” and “snapped.”
“[Campbell] punched the top of my bunk a bunch of times then said, ‘[You] wanna spaz out let’s spaz out,’ threw [his] cast off, put [his] fist up as I’m laying in my bed,” McGraw shared. “Like, wtf, what a sick psychopathic weirdo.”
“Really can’t believe they got me in this cell with a man!!!” she concluded the message.
In another message, McGraw again addresses Campbell’s incessant masturbation: “Barffffff! Some sickos will never change!!! It makes my skin crawl! I wanna puke, gag, can’t think about eating sleeping relaxing. This ain’t right…it’s not normal….it’s so wrong on every level! It’d be different if there was a level of respect! There’s not!”
Some of the female prisoner’s graphic descriptions of Campbell’s masturbation habits indicate that Campbell may have undergone a vaginoplasty, wherein surgeons remove the penis, testicles, and scrotum, rearranging tissue to create a faux vaginal canal and external genitalia.
“To create the vaginal canal, the surgeon uses a combination of the skin surrounding the existing penis along with the scrotal skin,” explains Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Dr. Fan Liang. “Depending on how much skin is available in the genital area, the surgeon may need to use a skin graft from the abdomen or thigh to construct a full vaginal canal.”
The procedure costs around $25,000 to $30,000, and takes six to eight weeks to recover from, according to Johns Hopkins. Liang claims that this faux vagina is sexually functional, but says that patients must avoid any form of sexual activity until 12 weeks after surgery.
McGraw vented to her fiancee that Campbell’s new, faux genitalia “stinks like rotten chicken.” She also said that Campbell, like other men who believe they are women and try to maintain a fake vaginal canal, dilates himself everyday so that the surgeon-crafted wound does not close.
Johns Hopkins Medicine describes this dilation as “part of the healing process after vaginoplasty” that involves “inserting a medical grade dilator into the vagina to keep your vaginal canal open as it heals.”
“A doctor or therapist from your care team will show you how to dilate,” writes Liang. “This can be difficult at first, but professionals will work with you and your comfort level to help you get accustomed to this aspect of your healing process. You will begin dilating with the smallest dilator in the dilator pack. You continue to use this dilator until cleared to advance to the next size by your care team.”
“Some patients may need to dilate their whole lives,” Liang adds.
McGraw described the process as “sickening,” writing to her fiancee that Campbell “literally shoves bananas inside of him or hot dogs, he told me when he moved in, and uses shampoo and f—- himself.”
Guidance from the DOC dated April 2018 states that “inmates may self-identify as transgender or intersex at intake or at any other time during an incarceration” and that “all sites are approved for transgender and intersex inmates” except for six facilities: Prairie du Chien Correctional Institution, Gordon Correctional Center, McNaughton Correctional Center, Chippewa Valley Correctional Treatment Facility, Flambeau Correctional Center, and St. Croix Correctional Center.
“Facility and housing assignments shall be made on a case-by-case basis, considering the inmate’s health and safety as well as potential programming, management and security concerns,” the guidance notes. “An inmate’s own views regarding safety shall be given careful consideration.”
If an inmate has undergone an attempted transgender transition surgery, that inmate will likely be placed in a facility consistent with the “reassignment treatment,” the guidance states. In other words, if a man undergoes attempted sex-change surgery to look like a woman, he will be housed with women — as Campbell’s case demonstrates.
“For the purposes of facility placement, self-inflicted genital mutilation does not constitute sexual reassignment surgery and does not qualify an inmate for placement in a different facility,” the guidance adds.
Transgender Inmates And Sexual Abuse
The Daily Signal previously reported that a little more than half of the men housed in Wisconsin Department of Corrections facilities who identify as transgender women have been convicted of at least one count of sexual assault or sexual abuse.
The revelation comes from records obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through an April 2022 public records request. The Oversight Project sought information on biologically male inmates seeking transfers to female prisons by saying they identified as transgender females. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Of the 161 biological men who are housed in Wisconsin Department of Corrections facilities who self-reported as transgender, 81 (50.3%) have been convicted of at least one count of sexual assault or sexual abuse as of late July. The prisoners may have been convicted of additional offenses for their current incarceration periods that are not sex offenses, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections noted.
Inmates convicted of sex offenses may have committed crimes including sexual exploitation of a child, sexual exploitation by a therapist, forced viewing of a sexual act, rape, sexual intercourse without consent, incest, sexual intercourse with a child, indecent behavior with a child, enticing a child, and more.
This is far from the first story of its kind. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported in April 2021 that a two-time baby killer had requested to be transferred to a women’s prison where the mother of his child was housed.
Forty-six-year-old Jessica M. Hann, formerly known as Jason Michael Hann, underwent a state-funded gender transition before transferring to the Central California Women’s Facility under the name “Jessica.” He is currently housed there on death row, inmate records show.
This article has been corrected to reflect the location of Taycheedah Correctional Institution.
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