Joss Greene, “The Insurgent Agency of Incarcerated Trans Women of Color”
Posted: Thu, Sep 26, 2024
Background
With rare exceptions, trans women are incarcerated in men’s facilities, where most experience sexual and physical assault.
- According to a recent NBC News investigation of 45 state prison systems, only 13 trans women in total live in women’s facilities.
- DOJ survey data suggest that as many as 39.9% of trans persons in federal and state custody were sexually assaulted in the preceding twelve months (the baseline prevalence was estimated to be 4.0% for all incarcerated persons).
- For trans women in particular, a recent study of the California system put the rate at 69.4% for sexual assault and 80.3% for physical assault throughout incarceration.
Prevailing analysis: incarcerated trans women’s vulnerability to sexual and physical assault is an instance of male domination over women.
- Note that a biological analysis like Brownmiller’s can’t explain any of this.
Greene’s interventions:
- Trans women’s place in the gender hierarchy among incarcerated persons is not just a function of gender, but also race, heterosexuality, and class.
- This race- and class-structured heterosexual gender hierarchy among incarcerated persons is not the only reason that trans women are systematically violated in men’s prisons; it is also a consequence of the nature of prisons themselves.
- Trans women do not passively endure violations but actively respond and resist.
Trans women in the prison sexual economy
Trans women, as women, provide heterosexual sex—a scarce, prohibited, and valuable good in men’s prisons.
- Protection is gained by commitment to monogamous heterosexual relationships with men.
- Greene: The mechanism here is not that a hypermasculine man will physically defend a feminine woman against assailants; rather, trans women get to become members of racialized and often gang-based social networks as the woman of a respected man.
- ~property theory of rape.
- Guards use their power to pressure trans women to “find a man” as soon as possible.
- The intention is not primarily to protect trans women, but to maintain order and exert control.
- Guards will lock trans women with known predators as a threat or punishment.
- Guards will also break up couples through transfers.
- Guards will penalize women who fight back by raising their security scores.
- Guards sexually abuse the women themselves.
- Greene: “the radical constraint of prisoners’ mobility and the power of guards to control and violate prisoners’ bodies” is an inherent feature of prison as a system of control.
- The intention is not primarily to protect trans women, but to maintain order and exert control.
- The heterosexual morality operative within prison walls penalizes women who have multiple partners and who do not choose partners carefully.
Trans women actively navigate and resist this social reality, rather than merely accept and receive it.
- Waiting to “pair up”: good reputation -> social standing -> options of partners.
- Strategically selecting partners: “status, resources, and likelihood of commitment.”
- Using sex as barter “to achieve necessary ends (safety, material sustenance) while simultaneously enjoying the pleasure of the means.”
- Building mutual-aid networks & passing on community knowledge.
- For the few women with the means, using money to gain control and isolation.
Trans women’s relationship with sex and partnerships is complicated.
- “A social world that incorporated trans women into heterosexuality was a marvel to many trans women of color.”
- “But these relationships could also feel like a degrading necessity.”
What to do? Greene:
- No reform will be enough to address the source of the problem: the prison system is designed to demobilize, dispossess, and dehumanize.
- In the meantime, expand choices under oppression—administrative, material, and otherwise.