Prisons As A Tool For Reproductive Oppression: Cross-Movement Strategies For Gender Justice

Whether they are about healthcare, placement, showers, or any number of other issues, prison policies and practices for trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people are never about promoting anyone’s safety, health, dignity, well-being, or self-determination. Rather, they serve other interests, including maintenance of a patriarchal gender binary system and white supremacy. One of the ways that they do this is through limiting or destroying the reproductive potential of transgender people and other people in prison.

Before I get into more detail about how these policies work, I need to take a moment to talk a little bit about some basics of trans healthcare. I apologize if everyone here already knows it. There are very strong cultural myths about trans healthcare. These myths say that trans people are people who wake up one morning, decide we want to change our sex, go to the nearest doctor’s office, get “the operation,” and become “the opposite sex” at that time. So there’s this one “the surgery” that makes us our gender that every trans person either wants to get or has already had, but there’s no real “need” for it, it’s more of a luxury or a whim.

In reality, there are a lot of different types of healthcare that trans people may want and need in relation to our gender. Hormone therapy is the most common type of treatment. There are also a number of different possible surgeries and other treatments. What’s right for each person is highly individual. Some trans people don’t want or need any sort of treatment or medical intervention in relation to our gender. Others of us may need hormones but not surgery, surgery but not hormones, one type of surgery but not another, or multiple types of surgeries in addition to hormones. There is no one “the surgery,” and we all are our gender, regardless of whether or not we’ve ever been to see a doctor about it.

For those of us who do need some sort of treatment or another, it is a real and legitimate need, and not getting it can really damage our health and our ability to function and live in the world. Besides being a medical need, whether or not to get these treatments are some of the most intimate decisions that a person can ever make about their bodies or the way they express their gender. Every person should have the right and the freedom to make these decisions for themselves, regardless of income or race. The vast majority of trans people, particularly among the low-income communities of color so vastly over-represented in prison systems, will never be able to get any surgical treatments related to gender regardless of whether or not they want or need them, because there’s simply no way they can access or afford them.

For the purposes of this discussion, I also want to add that most types of treatment that trans people may need in relation to our gender do not permanently end our ability to reproduce biologically. Some types of treatments have no effects on our reproductive capacity at all, and others have only temporary effects. There are a very few types of surgery some trans people need that can permanently end our ability to physically reproduce, unless of course we are fabulously wealthy and can afford to have eggs or sperm collected and preserved and then use assistive fertility technologies down the road.

There are several ways that the prison industrial complex exercises reproductive oppression against transgender and gender nonconforming people. One way is simply locking up huge numbers of trans people during the years when they could be having children. Trans people are disproportionately poor because of the intense discrimination they face in all aspects of life, and poverty is criminalized in our society in many ways. In addition, simply not conforming to gender norms is criminalized in many ways in society, and many trans people, particularly trans people of color, are locked up because they are profiled by police as violent and/or as sex workers, or because a cop thought they were using the wrong “restroom,” or otherwise because of the way their gender is perceived.

Once in prison, trans people aren’t placed in a men’s or women’s facility based on what would be safest for them, based on what they express would be most appropriate for them, based on their gender identity, or even based on the gender on their ID—rather, they are almost always placed based on what’s between their legs. If you ask prison officials why this is, sometimes they will give you some sort of a justification they claim is about safety, along the lines of, “Well, we can’t put someone with a penis in with women!” It’s a vicious and unfounded stereotype that trans women are more likely to do sexual harm than any other women. But even if prison officials believed that stereotype, it’s not the real reason why they won’t place trans women with other women. The prison industrial complex isn’t actually interested in stopping sexual violence against women. If it were, women wouldn’t be getting locked up for defending themselves against sexual violence, there wouldn’t be high rates of staff sexual violence against people in women’s prisons, and prison officials would be a little more concerned about the fact that most of the trans women in men’s facilities get sexually assaulted while there.

On the other hand, another justification that you’ll sometimes hear for these placement policies that I do think has some truth to it is that they don’t want anyone to be able to get pregnant in prison. In other words, it’s explicitly a part of the agenda of prison officials to make sure that trans women and non-trans women in prisons, who are mostly women of color and disproportionately disabled, cannot have children together, and to make sure that trans men and non-trans men in prisons, who are mostly men of color and disproportionately disabled, cannot have children together. It’s a part of the same system of eugenics that has been affecting communities of color, low-income communities, and disabled communities in this country and elsewhere for generations now.

In prisons, trans people are profoundly and on nearly every level forced to live in opposition to who they know themselves to be. They are also punished for any expression of their own gender. In women’s prisons, masculine people are often punished because they are assumed to be violent, trouble-makers, and engaged in sex with other people in prison. They also have to adhere to rules about dress, grooming, and shaving for women and get punished if they violate these standards—for example, a butch wasn’t brought to her court date because she refused to put on a skirt and a trans man was disciplined for not keeping his face clean shaven. In men’s prisons, trans women are also punished because they are assumed to be having sex or because they are breaking rules that are based on gender norms. So we see trans women getting put into punitive segregation for offenses like possessing a bra or putting on make-up. Typically the only way that one might, possibly, be able to get one’s gender identity acknowledged on any level, to get any relief from the constant punishment for expressing one’s gender, or for a trans woman to maybe get moved into a facility where she’ll be somewhat less of a target for sexual violence, is to have had a very particular type of genital surgery. The only sort of treatment that is ever seen as “enough” in these situations is almost always one of the few types of treatment that results in permanent loss of reproductive capacity. So in other words, to avoid torture for being who they are, trans people in prison need to have had a type of surgery that may or may not be right for them, that is nearly impossible for them to get, and that results in sterilization. Trans people’s rights are being conditioned on their giving up the ability to have children.

At the same time that prison officials are requiring trans people to have had these surgeries, they are not providing access to them. Often they won’t provide any other type of treatment either. Many trans people in prison are refused even hormone therapy, the most common and least expensive form of treatment that trans people can need. These denials are not only profoundly damaging the physical and mental health of trans people in prisons and robbing them of the ability to make intimate decisions about their own bodies and to self-determine their own gender, but they can also lead to loss of reproductive capacity in another way. Some trans women who are denied hormones or any form of other gender treatment end up trying to perform self-surgery—in other words, some try to treat themselves by amputating their own testicles or penis. This happens far more often in prisons than it does in the outside world. Self-treatments under these circumstances are of course extremely painful, dangerous to the point of life-threatening, and result in permanent sterilization, which may not have been what the person would have needed or chosen for themselves if they had been able to access other treatment options.

Another way that the prison industrial complex exercises reproductive oppression is through the way it interferes with trans people raising children. Trans people are already presumed to be unfit parents and face a lot of barriers in custody and visitation cases with their partners. We represented one trans woman who was ordered to dress and act like a man in order to visit her children. We also represented trans man who was denied the opportunity to adopt because the agency claimed his “sex change” would confuse the children. People in prison are physically kept away from raising their children when they are incarcerated and have their convictions used against them in custody and visitation cases; abuse, neglect, and termination of parental rights cases; and in adoption proceedings. This double stigma leaves trans people who have been incarcerated with relatively little chance of being able to raise their own children or to foster or adopt children in need of homes.

The final way that the prison industrial complex interferes with the ability of trans people to have children and limits the population of trans people is by literally killing trans people. Prison dramatically shortens the lifespan of trans people through repeated traumatic violence, severe medical neglect, the withholding of any effective means to prevent HIV transmission, lost opportunities for access to housing, income, or healthcare after release, as well as simply through the forced removal of people from their own communities and networks for support.

In summary, prison systems and the people who run them exercise reproductive oppression against and through the bodies of trans people, particularly trans people of color, in a number of ways. They prevent trans people from making intimate decisions about their own bodies and accessing healthcare that they need, which also sometimes leads to sterilizing self-treatment; they lock up trans people in large numbers during years when they could be having children; they keep trans people segregated from people they might be able to have children with even when that exposes them to extreme violence and/or isolation; they condition any recognition of a trans person’s gender identity on their having undergone sterilizing surgery; they increase barriers to trans people being able to care for their children; and they cut trans people’s lives short.

These are some of the reasons why at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project we believe so strongly in broad coalitional work against gender oppression in all forms. We work with many of the organizations here and many others not here to make sure that all people are able to access all of the healthcare they need and that all people can make their own decisions about their bodies, including trans people and those who are living in poverty or in prison. We also work to eliminate anything that ever conditions rights or the recognition of identity on having undergone any form of surgery or other medical treatment. Doctors should not be the guardians of anyone’s civil rights. These are also some of the reasons why we’re here and working with all of you to end the policing and incarceration of trans communities and all communities. I’m looking forward to getting to know you and building with you over this weekend.