OPINIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE FRENCH CGLPL 8. Throughout the care procedure, the prison administration must ensure that the physical integrity of transsexual prisoners is protected without this leading necessarily to their being placed in isolation, and must ensure that they are not subjected to any pressure or bullying of any kind from any other person by reason of their choice. If they ask to be placed in an individual cell, their wishes must be respected. 9. In view of the need to respect the right to privacy, transsexual prisoners should be able to wear clothes and use health and beauty products appropriate to their preferred gender when in their cells. They should therefore be able to purchase such items from the prison shop. 10. Once the care procedure has started, body searches should be conducted with particular restraint, in such a way as to respect prisoners’ dignity. Once the irreversibility of the sex change process has been medically certified by the multidisciplinary team responsible, body searches must be conducted, in a manner that preserves the dignity of both prisoners and staff, by officers of the same sex as the prisoner following the sex change, without waiting for civil status records to be modified. These searches must be conducted by officers specially trained for this purpose by the prison management. 11. The interests of the particular individual and the imperatives of prison management must be reconciled as fully as possible when assigning transsexual prisoners to a prison or prison wing. For this reason, they should be assigned to a prison or prison wing corresponding to their new sexual identity at the earliest possible opportunity, once the irreversibility of the sex change process has been established26 and, at the latest, when the person’s civil status records are modified. In the judicial process for modifying civil status records,27 priority must in any case be given to prisoners in view of the implications which that modification has for their conditions of detention. Article D 248 of the Code of Criminal Procedure might therefore be amended as follows: “Men and women shall be imprisoned in separate establishments unless authorisation to the contrary, justified by exceptional circumstances, has been given by the authority responsible for prisoner assignment." 27 As defined in the circular issued by the Minister of Justice on 14th May 2010. 26 52