Inside and Out: Black Trans Women Incarcerated in the South

RACHEL MARIE-CRANE WILLIAMS University of Iowa

Inside and Out: Black Trans Women Incarcerated in the South THE INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES OF PEOPLE WHO ARE INCARCERATED have deep repercussions for their quality of life in prison including their mental and physical health and safety. Variations in identity tied to sexuality, race, offense, and/or gender have long been a source of scrutiny and an excuse prisons use for the heightened surveillance of individuals. For women who are transgender, their experiences of oppression and power intersect with other identities they hold related to race, sexuality, class, age, and ability.

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Mississippi Quarterly 74.1 (2021): 9–30 © 2022 Mississippi State University

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The subject formations of transgender women by people who play a role in their incarceration vary and can have lasting impacts on the experiences they endure. Like all people, incarcerated trans women have intersectional identities and various ways of being and world making.

Despite this, there are many common threads which tie together their experiences in prisons and jails. These include ongoing threats of danger, inappropriate housing accommodations, a lack of appropriate medical care, and a perception by others that they are deceptive, dangerous, and untrustworthy. These experiences are further complicated by interlocking categories used by prisons and the justice system such as security classifications, offense, sentence, and status on the outside as a partner or caregiver.

Prison systems in the United States have no formal acknowledgement of the variations and complexity of gender within human populations. For these women, simply existing in a system like this— designed to be harmful and isolating—is an act of resistance. Prison policy and culture are also complicated by regional politics. In particular, prisons in the US South have been instruments in the long history of racism and cisheteropatriarchy further complicated by the long shadow of Christianity.

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Trans women suffer not only the ongoing trauma and depravity that are intertwined and common in the lives of all people who are incarcerated, but suffer a unique psychological and physical harm at the hands of the system.

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The intersections of gender, carceral, and racial identities subject these women under the “care” of the state to physical, psychological, economic, and sexual violence.

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The lives of many trans women are stalked by violence. This violence follows them if they become incarcerated. Black trans women are even more likely to experience violence before and during their incarceration.

Culture, medicine, and the law intersect to create an environment where the grinding and continuous deprivation, degradation, and violence trans people experience are amplified; in addition, it is likely that they will be subjected to extreme transphobia and their position as a trans person will be linked automatically to medicalization, “. . . the process of how non-medical problems become defined and treated as medical problems” (shuster 9).

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The history of gender and medicine is fraught. For many decades, medical professionals classified people who identified as trans as having a psychiatric disorder. Even now, the medical community requires people who seek gender-affirming technologies to work through a series of gatekeepers and be diagn diagnosed with gender dysphoria prior to prescribcement therapy y (HRT) or surgery. g y ing hormone replacement * XBT PO 4QSJP

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Incarcerated trans people rarely experience compassionate treatment in prison, even by medical staff. Still, as Julia C. Oparah writes, “the medical model undermines the oppositional and liberatory potentiality of transgender identities even as it offers the potential for more compassionate treatment” (247).

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In some systems, the state “allows” prisoners to self-identify in terms of gender, but for all intents and purposes those in power rely on a visual inspection including genitalia to determine how to gender people who are incarcerated. When people don’t “pass” as the gender they have identified, or are gender queer, trans, gender non-conforming, or gender fluid, prison officials will often assume there is deception at play deployed to get special treatment or privileges. Most are housed with others who share their sex assigned at birth. In addition, this medicalization of transness erases the fact that many people who identify as trans do not wish to change their bodies or engage with the field of medicine. This rejection of somatechnics nics further complicates their treatment under carceral rceral regimes. )35 JTO U NFEJDBMMZ OFDFTTBSZ SJHIU *T IF GBLJO

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Incarcerated people seeking medical care related to their gender are often subjected to unnecessary and discriminatory gatekeeping by prison officials and healthcare providers. In southern states there is a lack of competent and affordable providers who specialize in trans healthcare (Clark).

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To contextualize the modern day experiences of trans people, especially those who identify as Black, who are incarcerated in the South, it is important to look at the history of prisons and examine hegemonic ideas related to gender and race undergirded by religion.

The segregated prison system of the United States is based on a series of rigid binaries. These can be traced back to colonial monolithic categories of gender (male and female) and race (Black and white). Even now, the Alabama Department of Corrections, for example, has only three categories for race: white, Black, and “other” (Alabama Department of Corrections 9, 11, 13). These limited binary categories bolster Anglo cisheteropatriarchy. After the Civil War, the system of the enslavement of Black people in the South was replaced by a system of “Black Codes” and convict leasing. This eventually gave way to prison farms and chain gangs. Skipping forward, the War on Drugs of the 1960s gave rise to the supermax p risons of the 1980s and 1990s. prisons

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Originally derived from the Bible, ideas about dominion, inferiority, and criminality played a key role in shaping scientific racism, the economy, and the laws and systems on which the United States was founded. Consistently, Black people have always been disproportionately targeted, positioned as inferior to whites, depicted as inherently criminal, and incarcerated at higher rates than whites.

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The cultural and spatial geography of the Bible belt reinforces patriarchy, cultural hegemony, and conservative politics that overlap with racism. Violence is inherent at these intersections. This creates an especially dangerous atmosphere for people who identify as trans. They p xtraordinary public and private pri violen often experience extraordinary violence. * IBWFO U CFFO UP DIVSDI TJODF * XBT B DIJME

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This clash between naturalization of these ideas handed down by Christianity and the constraints they produce has been present since white Anglican settlers began to invade the Eastern seaboard. Constrained notions of sex, race, and gender traveled across the Atlantic with the colonists who settled Jamestown.

The United States is steeped in a “cultural-nationalist and state-sanctioned model of sex and family” (Lindsey and Johnson 176). These ideas undergirded slavery in the United States, an institution where forced rape and sexual violence were inherent. Gender was important only as it related to reproduction and capital. Black people, who were enslaved, were characterized as hypersexual, predatory, and a threat to the nuclear family. Black women were cast as having the power to seduce white slave owners and Black men were cast as predators hungry to consume white women (Young).

These harmful ideas have been repurposed as predatory narratives about people who operate outside binary ideas of race, sexuality, and gender. Gender is conceived in the United States with white cis heterosexual people as centered subjects; people who are not identified as white historically have already been perceived as inferior (Nordmarken; McClintock). These ideas have intersected and put Black trans women into what Deborah King terms “multiple jeopardy” (47).

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Rates of imprisonment are highest in the South in comparison with the rest of the United States, with the exception of Arizona and Idaho (Hubbard slide 12). Rates of murder for trans people in 2020 were also at a record high in the United States. Almost half took place in the South (“Fatal Violence”).

The story of Ophelia Azriel De’lonta illustrates what many Black trans women who are incarcerated experience. Her story has common her stories off trans wo threads with other women in the system. *G * XBT B HJSM

At seventeen, Ophelia committed armed robbery. It was a desperate attempt to escape the danger, poverty, discrimination, and confines of Virginia in favor of starting a new life in San Francisco. She imagined moving to a place where she might escape violence and finally be accepted as a woman, something she had sought to do since she was a child. She hoped that the money she might steal as part of the botched armed robbery would help her pay for medical care during her transition.

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Almost one in two Black trans people (47%) will be incarcerated in their lifetime (Grant et al. 163). Rates of sexual assault for trans women are much higher in men’s prisons than for men incarcerated in the same spaces. For trans women who are incarcerated in the South, where hegemonic masculinity is embraced, especially by white rural men, this danger can be heightened.

The South is characterized by conservative gender politics. In 2017, red states like North Carolina and Texas tried to pass “bathroom bills” and prohibit protections for people who identify as trans. This move created a swift backlash from more progressive sectors of the United States. Most recently, new anti-trans measures are being volleyed around which are part of an old strategy. Members of the GOP are pushing legislation that would not allow trans women to compete in women’s sports. Like the bathroom bills, this justification is tied to the safety of women. In 2021, there have been sixty-nine anti-trans sports bills introduced so far. Forty-two of those bills have been concentrated in states which fall below the Mason-Dixon line.

Arkansas passed a number of anti-trans bills, one related to medical care, another related to sports bans, as well as a religious refusal bill.

Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia also passed anti-trans sports bans.

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For most people, even those who have high-quality health insurance, the costs of medical care related to transitioning can be insurmountable. For people like Ophelia, who desire access to somatechnics but are unable to afford them or gain access, there are high rates of suicidal ideation, depression, and distress.

In 1983 she was convicted and began serving a sentence of seventythree years in the Virginia Department of Corrections system. During her time in custody in various men’s prisons in the state she was repeatedly raped and assaulted (Spies).

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In 2003 the Prison Rape Elimination Act was passed. It has failed to keep incarcerated people safe. In 2007, Valerie Jenness, a researcher, documented that trans women incarcerated in men’s facilities were thirteen times more likely to be assaulted than the men that lived there.

Usually, these assailants use a weapon; it is not uncommon for correctional officers to be unaware of the assault and for the victims to receive no medical treatment.

While some people who are incarcerated engaged in sex acts in exchange for companionship, commissary, privileges, or protection, it is hard to discern if the engagement is completely consensual. Assault and rape are not only perpetrated by the people who are incarcerated, but these acts can also be perpetrated by correctional staff.

These crimes not only impact the victim of the assault, but might also impact their family members. Many people, including those who identify as trans, have supportive partners and loving kinship networks outside utside of prison.

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Ophelia did not have a strong system of support within the prisons where she was incarcerated. When she entered the prison system, she was diagnosed by doctors with Gender Identity Disorder (GID).

According to Sarah Halbach, “An Eighth Amendment violation occurs where prison officials have shown ‘deliberate indifference’ to the serious medical needs of prisoners. . . . The Supreme Court has provided little guidance on what constitutes a serious medical need” (475). It took a decade for the Department of Corrections to allow Ophelia to receive HRT. Just a few years later in 1995, after sh she was transferred, the chief physician abruptly termina ated her HRT treatment trea terminated citing a newly written policy.

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The withdrawal made Ophelia feel nauseated; her skin crawled. This abrupt termination created not only a physical, but a mental health crisis for Ophelia. Her self-harming behaviors became even more pronounced. Her experience was excruciating and her mental health was deeply affected. Her suffering went on for years and her dysphoria grew worse.

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She tried over twenty ty tim times to remove her genitals. Every time she f, she could never complete the act because of tried to castrate herself, vasovagal syncope and d blood loss loss. *G JU T TIBSQ JU MM CF GBTU BOE DMFBO

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In 1999, Ophelia sued the state of Virginia and won. After four years e, she was allowed to re of legal red tape, resume HRT and dress as a woman. $SVFM BOE VOVTVBM QVOJTINFOU

Despite this small victory she was still deeply distressed. She sued again in 2011, desperate to have feminizing surgery and end her mental anhead y she guish. In 2013, just as she was beginning to make legal headway, ng time left physical was granted parole (Walker and Alexander). Serving and psychological scars.

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Prior to her release in January 2014, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, found in her favor: according to the ACLU, the court “ruled that Ophelia De’lonta stated a ‘plausible’ claim that the Virginia Department of Corrections violated her constitutional rights when it refused to have her evaluated for sex reassignment surgery” (ACLU Virginia). Many saw her parole as a way for the Virginia Department of Corrections to avoid having to provide her with proper medical care.

Ophelia’s story is like many other stories of trans prisoners who are abused, denied care, humiliated, scrutinized, isolated, and harmed because of their gender. In North Carolina, Kanautica Zayre-Brown had begun to surgically alter her body. She changed her name and gender formally. Despite this, after she was arrested and convicted in 2017, she was housed in a men’s facility and referred to by her dead name and male pronouns. She and her husband constantly feared the possibility of sexual assault and abuse. She was eventually moved and put in solitary confinement. Public pressure and organizing by her husband, the ACLU of North Carolina, and local activists caused the North Carolina Department of Public Safety to buckle transfer her to a women’s uckle and transf facility (Nichols). * GFFM MJLF NZ NFOUBM health JT EFQMFUJOH * N BSPVOE GFNBMFT OPX BOE DPOTUBOUMZ SFNJOEFE PG NZ TJUVBUJPO *U USJHHFST NZ EZTQIPSJB FWFO NPSF.

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Kanautica may never be allowed to consult with appropriate medical professionals at UNC-Chapel Hill or surgically finish her gender transition as long as she is incarcerated in North Carolina, a conservative Southern state with a record of anti-trans legislation.

The South will always be haunted by a long history of repressive and disciplining practices related to race, gender, and sexuality that are intertwined in the current culture and carried out in the carceral spaces that dot the landscape. Trans women, especially women who identify as Black, experience the intersection of their racial, carceral, and trans identities in ways that are deeply impacted by social stressors in and practices of oppression and violence carried out by the state. Within carceral spaces the stressors are magnified and in some cases part of the punishment they experience while they are incarcerated. Every person has a human right to be recognized before the law. The identity of people who are trans is regularly ignored or used as a weapon of humiliation and violence.

The history of antebellum ideas, oppressive religious ideologies, xenophobia, and Anglo cisheteropatriarchy continues to imbue the carceral South. Trans people incarcerated in the South and across the United States will continue to suffer as agents of the state deny their personhood, fail to allow them access to appropriate medical care, ignore their safety, and continuously discipline and punish them simply for existing.

The state is a harmful presence in the lives of most people who are trans. In prisons that harm is hidden from public view, magnified, and inflicted with an eye toward retribution and punishment not just for a crime, but also for resisting hegemony.

These ideas are deeply embedded in the culture of the US South and can have deadly consequences not just for people who are trans but for anyone who resists. Overlaying the carceral geography we currently inhabit in the United States with these ideas makes visible how harmful and sometimes deadly historical hegemonic ideas related to race, gender, sexuality and punishment have been and continue to be in the United States.

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Works Cited ACLU of Virginia. “De’lonta v. Johnson (amicus).” [2021.] acluva.org/ en/cases/delonta-v-johnson-amicus.

Alabama Department of Corrections, Research and Planning Division.

Monthly Statistical Report for April 2021. www.doc.state.al.us/docs/ MonthlyRpts/April%202021.pdf.

Clark, Maria. “Southern Trans Adults Struggle to Find Health Care.

Here’s Why.” Daily Advertiser, 13 Dec. 2019, www.theadvertiser. com/story/life/2019/12/12/transgender-health-care-access-americansouth/3945129002/.

De’lonta v. Angelone. United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit, 27 May 2003. Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, University of Michigan Law School, www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/PCVA-0006-0002.pdf.

De’lonta v. Johnson. Brief of amici curiae American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, Inc. in Support of Appellant. 6 Jan. 2012. ACLU, acluva.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/2012DeLont Brief.pdf.

“Did lawmakers not learn from HB2? New NC Senate bill would harm transgender teens.” Herald-Sun, 12 Apr. 2012, www.heraldsun. com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article250603519.html.

Dotson, Kristie. “Making Sense: The Multistability of Oppression and the Importance of Intersectionality.” Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach, edited by Namita Goswami, Maeve M. O’Donovan, and Lisa Yount. Pickering and Chatto, 2014, pp. 43-57.

Dugan, Jess T., and Vanessa Fabbre. “To Survive on This Shore: Selections from the South.” Southern Cultures, vol. 25, no. 2, 2019, pp.

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Grant, Jaime M., Lisa Mottet, Justin E. Tanis, Jack Harrison, Jody Herman, and Mara Keisling. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. National Center for

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Halbach, Sarah. “Framing a Narrative of Discrimination Under the Eight Amendment in The Contexts of Transgender Prisoner Health Care.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 105, no. 2, 2015, pp. 463–97. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26402454.

Hubbard, Kaia. “Ten States With The Highest Incarceration Rates.” U.S. News and World Report, 12 Mar. 2021, www.usnews.com/ news/ best-states/slide-shows/10-states-with-the-highest-incarcerationrates?slide=12.

King, Deborah K. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs, vol. 14, no. 1, 1988, pp.

42–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3174661.

Lamb, Amanda. “State Moves Transgender Inmate, But Not to Women’s Prison.” WRAL.Com. 24 May, 2019, www.wral.com/state-movestransgender-inmate-but-not-to-womens-prison/18298786/.

Lindsey, Treva B., and Jessica Johnson. “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom.” Meridians, vol. 12, no. 2, 2014, pp. 169-95. doi:10.2979/meridians.12.2.169 McClintok, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995.

Mitchem, Stephanie Y. “Embodiment, Gender, and Re-Li-gion.”CrossCurrents, vol. 68, no. 4, 2018, pp. 550–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26756885.

Nichols, James M. “NC Prisoner Kanautica Zayre-Brown Says DPS Won’t Let Her Get Gender-Affirming Surgery.” Indy-week, 4 March, 2020, indyweek.com/news/northcarolina/nc-prisoner-kanautica-zayre-brown-gender-affirming-surgery/.

Nordmarken, Sonny. “Queering Gendering: Trans Epistemologies and the Disruption and Production of Gender Accomplishment Practices.” Feminist Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2019, pp. 36-66. doi:10.15767/feministstudies.45.1.0036.

Oparah, Julia C. “Feminism and the (Trans)Gender Entrapment of Gender Nonconforming Prisoners.” UCLA Women’s Law Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 2012, pp. 239-71. escholarship.org/content/qt25r8541z /qt25r8541z.pdf.

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Fire!!!, vol. 5, no. 2, 2020, pp. 2–39. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/ 10.5323/48573836. shuster, stef. Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender. NYU Press, 2021.

Spies, Mike, “What It’s Like to Be A Transgender Woman in a Maxsecurity Prison.” Vocativ, 8 Apr. 2015, www.vocativ.com/underworld/crime/what-its-like-to-be-a-transgender-woman-in-a-maxsecurity-prison/index.html.

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Young, Hershini Bhana. “Inheriting the Criminalized Black Body: Race, Gender, and Slavery in ‘Eva’s Man.’” African American Review, vol. 39, no. 3, 2005, pp. 377–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40033670.