Lost in Translation: Looking for Transgender Identity in Women’s Prisons and Locating Aggressors in Prisoner Culture

Lost in Translation: Looking for Transgender Identity in Women’s Prisons and Locating Aggressors in Prisoner Culture

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To be sure, broad understandings of what transgender means and who qualifies as transgender exist beyond the medical community. They stretch far across the landscape of gender identities and expressions, with ‘‘transgender’’ commonly used as an umbrella term for gender nonconformity more generally even as the specifics continue to vary (Namaste 2000; Girshick 2011; Stryker 2008). A critical next step in the specification of what transgender means is a more nuanced examination of the cultural contexts within which these varied understandings of the term exist. The prison, as a historically gendered and sexualized environment, continues to provide an ideal arena in which to examine the role of context in making sense of dynamic categorical understandings of gender and sexuality. With few exceptions, sex-segregation has been and continues to be a prevailing foundation of the management of prisons in the United States and abroad, despite an emerging understanding of prisons as gender-integrated (Sumner & Jenness 2014). Furthermore, the prison exists as a gendered institution not just by virtue of workplace policies and practices that attend to gender both implicitly and explicitly (Britton 1997; 2003) but also in terms of prisoner culture (Dolovich 2012; Jewkes 2005; Sabo et al. 2001). Indeed, the historical and contemporary prison literature alike reveals the centrality of socio-sexual cultural norms, hierarchies, and informal language (argot) to prisoner culture more generally (Donaldson 1993; Fleisher and Krienert 2009; Hensley et al. 2003; Sykes 1958). This paper capitalizes on the prison as a gendered (and gender-integrated), sex-segregated setting in order to examine the place that transgender prisoners occupy in women’s prisons. To do so, we conducted focus groups with staff and prisoners in one women’s prison in order to reveal and explain normative understandings about the role of transgender prisoners in women’s prison culture. Thus, this work builds upon what little is known about transgender prisoners and how they fit into the larger gendered and sexualized carceral environment.