Gender Integration in Sex-Segregated U.S. Prisons: The Paradox of Transgender Correctional Policy

Abstract

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the development of correctional policies in the United States related to transgender prisoners has rendered visible transgender prisoners, disrupted the taken-for-granted policies and practices related to the operation of sex-segregated prisons, and presented considerable challenges to those charged with running penal institutions. The courts and correctional administrators in particular have grappled with how best to adjudicate tensions born of the visible presence of transgender prisoners in prisons charged with housing men (and only men). We draw on multiple sources of data, including correctional policies, published surveys, court opinions, activist testimony, news documents, and legal discourse, to analyze the parameters of extant transgender correctional policy in the U.S. Our examination reveals that transgender correctional policy is: shaped by “safety and security” concerns, arguably the central institutional logic underlying the management of prisons; unsettled insofar as there is both convergence and divergence in the content of policy related to transgender inmates (e.g., there is almost complete agreement on the enforcement of anatomy-based housing policies and there is considerable disagreement over policies related to hormonal treatment); and attentive to the control of place for transgender prisoners, although not comparable control of “presentation and demeanor” for transgender prisoners. A collateral consequence of these features of correctional policy is that prisons for men in the U.S. are at once sex-segregated and multi-gendered.