Ciswoman Recieves Transphobic Prison Treatment

The MetroWeekly, a GLBT paper in the DC area, recently ran an article, titled Gender Confusion, about a cis woman who ended up in a men’s prison because the arresting officers thought she was a trans woman. She had been arrested on suspiscion of prostitution and was strip searched (presumably as an attempt to identify her gender, but the article doesn’t specify). The officers must have thought she was a trans woman who had had genital surgery and threw her into the men’s prison.

This story is interesting for a few reasons. Everything about it is presented as a horrible mistake. The police , the member of the GLLU (Gay and Lesbian Unit), and the author all discuss the incident as a horrible mistake. The repercussions are certainly horrible and although the article doesn’t get into her experience in a men’s prison, placing women in men’s prison it’s commonly thought of as being sentenced to rape. But the fact that the police regularly place women in situations where they expect to be raped is not the mistake, the mistake is that it happened to a woman who wasn’t trans.

The police don’t question the practice of regularly placing trans women in situations where they will be raped. They only lament that they accidentally subjected a non-trans woman to the violence that they regularly subject trans women to. I would assume that as this story gains traction the emphasis will be about how horrible that a woman who was not trans received such mistreatment. That much is clear already from the fact that there are so few stories on trans women receiving this mistreatment despite being its being a regular occurance.

At the end of the article the Trans Coalition is briefly quoted “…this is what happens to transgender people all the time.” Such treatment is pepetrated by the transphobic presumption that transwomen are men, but as Saelkie points out in the Transnews Livejournal community, they police never once thought that she was a man.

Maybe confusion is understandable in the sense that they apparently had no training on how to incarcerate transpeople at all, but they clearly thought of her as a woman the whole time anyway. They profiled her as a trans sex worker, based on the common stereotype that all transwomen are sex workers. So they thought she was a woman the whole freakin time. The reason they thought it was OK to put her in a men’s prison is because they also thought she was trans, which they thought meant they had the right to disrespect her gender identity and abuse her. Being pre-op or non-op does not make a transwoman a man, and no matter how much the cops pretend they can’t tell the difference, all the other guards and prisoners can [emphasis mine] – which is why putting transwomen in men’s prisons is not only disrespectful but hideously physically violent.

And finally, I must comment on the fact that the article includes both the name and picture of the victim in the story. Admittedly I don’t know the finer details of the journalistic practice of not naming victims of violence, but I would hope that such a practice would be applied even if law enforcement is the perpetrator of such violence. The picture seems to be a grainy photocopy of a mugshot and leads me to wonder why it was included. It might have been included to help us humanize her experience. But I can’t help but fear it will do the opposite. Her appearance was a significant part of the motivation for her mistreatment and the police try to excuse their behavior by the fact that she looked like a trans woman. Readers could easily be lead by their transphobia to analyze her appearance, as if her facial structure could somehow make the “confusion” around her mistreatment excusable. And then the focus would even more effectively be taken away from the regular practice of mistreating trans women in this way and focused onto the tragedy of this case as a random “fluke.”

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