In the wake of President Donald Trump’s January executive order that declared transgender people do not exist, all federal prisons have reportedly begun implementing new anti-trans clothing policies.
Trump had directed the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to only incarcerate trans women in men’s facilities and remove their access to vital health care. According to NPRon February 3 a new policy of unknown origin was given to all BOP facilities that currently house trans prisoners. Anyone in a men’s facility who had previously been allowed clothing generally reserved for those in women’s facilities was instructed to turn it in, along with certain feminine hygiene products they’d been allowed to purchase from commissary.
The new policy also reportedly shuttered all therapy groups or other programming designed for people with gender dysphoria, and all trainings that “inculcate or promote gender ideology or have done so in the past.” Prisoners prescribed hormone-replacement therapy were warned they would soon be cut off.
“The information that we’ve been getting [from BOP] is that no guidance is issued when obviously guidance is being issued,” Kara Jansenn, lawyer at a firm representing three trans women who have sued to block their transfer to a men’s facility, told NPR. “People that we’ve spoken to who are transgender and who are in custody are terrified. They’re terrified that they’re going to lose things that they had to fight years for.”
It took me about two years to get bras, and four years to get panties.
I spent nearly 14 years incarcerated in men’s facilities in Georgia. The first time I requested women’s undergarments, officers laughed in my face and told me it’d never happen. It did, but it took about two years to get bras and four years to get panties.
This first requires a diagnosis of gender dysphoria; that alone can take months, as the medical department bounces you to the mental health department and vice versa. It then requires submitting a request to the warden or property officer, who frequently denied mine even after I obtained the gender dysphoria diagnosis. That forced me to file grievances over the denials, which could also take months to process.
That’s for the plain white state-issue undergarments. Access to the property packages—shipments of clothing and hygiene products that prisoners are permitted to purchase through approved vendors—designed for the women’s facilities was an even bigger fight, but worth it because of all the goodies you won’t find in the men’s property packages. Makeup; better skincare products; scented shampoo and conditioner; scrunchies; clothes with little color accents, breaking up the monotony of everything being white and grey.
“The women were screaming and crying, saying, ‘Where are you taking us?’”
Every women’s deodorant stick or fitted T-shirt represents a hard-won battle against bureaucracy, bigotry and indifference. Mass incarceration depends on replacing individuality with uniformity. Stripping trans people of the items that affirm their identity, trying to make us invisible, is part of that.
“The officers yelled at these women: ‘Come right now, leave your things. You don’t have time to pack,’” a trans man told the Guardian in Spanish, after the Texas women’s prison where he’s currently incarcerated rounded up all the trans women from their cells one by one.
He recalled one officer laughing at a woman trying to pack her bra, telling her she wouldn’t need that where she was going. “The officials were degrading them and saying disgusting things, like: ‘We don’t have to call you women anymore. Where you’re going, you’re going to be a man’ … the women were screaming and crying, saying, ‘Where are you taking us?’”
In multiple casessome of these actions were reversed days later, with recent memos being rescinded and confiscated items given back. This is not a sign of victory; only more chaos and uncertainty.
Image (cropped) via Federal Bureau of Prisons
