Racism and Sexism Questions

Week 14: Transphobic and Gendered Violence, Policing Selfhood

Transgender Incarcerated People in Crisis (Lambda Legal)

• Nearly one in six transgender Americans—and one in two black transgender people—has been to prison. Once behind bars, discriminatory policies and the constant threat of sexual assault can make prison a living hell for this already mistreated group. Lambda Legal documented the unique dangers faced by transgender prisoners through a 2012 survey called Protected and Served?

The transgender prison crisis is part of a larger pattern of violence and discrimination in U.S. society that disproportionately affects people of color, poor people and transgender and gendernonconforming (TGNC) people. “Over-policing and profiling of low-income people and of trans and gender-nonconforming people intersect,” as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) describes it, “producing a far higher risk than average of imprisonment, police harassment and violence for low-income trans people.”

• Violence against TGNC people tends to be worse in places that are separated by sex such as county jails, immigration facilities and prisons. In the United States, transgender incarcerated people are still usually housed according to the sex assigned at birth, instead of by gender identity—one’s inner sense of being male, female or something else. This policy makes transgender people more vulnerable to harassment or attack by staff or fellow incarcerated people: A California study found that transgender people were 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-transgender people in prison.

• U.S. prison officials also commonly block the access of incarcerated people to transition-related health care such as hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery (SRS), even when it’s prescribed as medically necessary by a doctor.

• The TGNC prison crisis has been attracting public concern thanks to the continued efforts of organizations such as SRLP and Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice (TGIJP). The result has been a series of major policy shifts and important legal precedents.

• Among these is the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), passed unani- mously in 2003, which in 2012 established long-demanded national standards for preventing, detecting and reporting prison rape. A new federal policy on transgender health care is now in effect as well. In the courts, incarcerated people have repeatedly found recourse since the 1994 Supreme Court decision Farmer v. Brennan, which provides precedent for transgender people to argue that the failure to protect them from sexual abuse and other violence, and the failure to provide transition-related health care is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

• These promising legal developments don’t change the fact that conditions for TGNC people behind bars remain discriminatory and dangerous. While PREA carries potential financial penalties for prison systems that do not comply, it does allow incarcerated people to file a lawsuit in court for violations of its provisions. Enforcement and education are an uphill climb.

“We Got Issues”: Black Trans* as Method

• The special issues asks what are the possible and impossible methodologies when it comes to black trans* studies? What happens when trans* studies becomes canonical?

• Internal to the methodology is black feminism and black queer studies; as well, the question of the human and questions of being

• Black trans* methodology illustrates the ways in which blackness does not always map onto questions of sexuality and gender; and the existential and material effects as an outcome of this

• The matter of blackness as overseen produces one way of viewing how transversality express the links between trans thought, trans life and death, Black thought, and Black life and death

Imprisonment, Death, and Academia

• “The persistent premature death of Black transwomen and Black women and their exploitations in the political economy of academic and beyond means we did not receive many submissions from Black transwomen…. This is, of course, only a gesture toward a Black future wherein Black transwomen’s ideas and scholarship run at the front and center of Black academic thought.”

• ”There are multiple and contradictory flows of Black feminist theory that do not agree with each other in relationship to gender and embodiment. These disjunctures in Black feminism reappear in this issue. Is Black feminism an interrogation of gender or an attachment to the category of “Black woman”? We leave our readers with a nonexhaustive bibliography to move forward in partial answer to these questions, even if it does not land you safely in the status of arrival.”

CeCe McDonald, Che Gossett, and George Yancy

• What is the role of care, intimacy, and support that McDonald, Tinsley, Gossett, and Yancy imagine?

• How does the question of black trans* imprisonment square with the larger history of the Middle Passage and the Black (Queer) Atlantic? (Tinsley)

• How might we reimagine freedom anew through the lens of abolition?