UC Press Blog

By Joss T. Greene, author of Gender Bound: Prisons Trans Lives and the Abolitionist Horizon

I began the research for Gender Bound back in 2015—a very different political moment. Time Magazine had just put Laverne Cox on their cover and declared a “Transgender Tipping Point.” We had supposedly turned the corner on trans exclusion and were poised to foresee expanding rights and recognition. The Black Lives Matter movement was putting racial justice and a critique of the criminal justice system at the fore. 

Because of this conjuncture, transgender criminal justice reform was a hot topic. This included everything from calls to provide transgender sensitivity training to the police, to proposed reforms regarding housing and healthcare for trans people in prison.

 Scholars and policymakers were largely optimistic about these reforms mitigating transgender inequality.  Their thinking was that prisons had always been rigidly sex-segregated institutions that reinforced binary gender norms and punished those who violated them. Now prisons seemed to be attempting to respect people’s identities and embrace a kind of organizational gender fluidity. I entered the project assuming I would find what the literature suggested: prisons had always neglected and repressed gender-nonconformity, and in the past years had started doing something different. 

Of course, in an experience that will be familiar to qualitative researchers, I began data collection and immediately discovered my assumptions were wrong. The fourth formerly incarcerated person I interviewed was the woman I call Rachel in the book, who had been imprisoned in California during the 1970’s.  She explained that in 1977 a multiracial group of trans women prisoners campaigned for bras and hormones.  Against all odds, they advanced their demands through every level of administrative appeal and won! My research suggests that this was the first time that both bras and hormones were made available to incarcerated trans women in men’s prisons in the United States. 

I was electrified by this interview and immediately asked contemporary advocates in my field site about it. They were astonished, not only because they didn’t know this history, but because they—in the mid-2010’s—felt like they were fighting for trans prisoners’ bra and hormone access for the first time.

This created a new puzzle. My project was no longer a story of an always-gender-repressive prison system that had just begun doing fluid and progressive things in the past few years. Now the question was: how was it possible that prisons approached gender-nonconformity one way in the 1970’s, in a different way throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, and in still a different way in the 21st century? This was hard to square with the gender and punishment scholarship, but in line with insights from the scholarship on penal change.

The penal change literature tells us that the logics, architecture, staffing, and capacity of the criminal justice system have changed radically over the past century, and that this has had many effects on incarcerated men and women. I began to ask whether these penal changes (not themselves gender-specific) may have changed how the prison interpreted and responded to gender-nonconformity. What if instead of asking how different penal regimes affect men or women, I asked how changes in penal regimes affected how the very boundary between men and women is interpreted, regulated, and navigated?

The final project draws on 20 months of ethnography shadowing trans prisoner advocates and formerly incarcerated trans people between 2015-2018, 136 interviews with formerly incarcerated trans people, advocates, former prison staff, and policy makers, and material from state and private archives. I use this data to examine struggles over gender boundaries in California prisons from the 1940’s—when California’s centralized department of corrections was created—through the present.

The book ultimately answers two questions. First, how do prisons manage gender boundaries? While we tend to think of prisons as rigidly sex-segregated institutions that persistently sanction non-normative gender, I identify four distinct approaches to gender boundary management from the 1940’s to the present, because of historical changes in punishment over this time period. I argue that prison administrators manage gender boundaries based on the penal logics and resources at their disposal. The prison’s modes of expertise, architecture, and management practices all inform how prison staff interpret and act towards those with non-normative gender. The mid-century “rehabilitative” prison system sought to correct prisoner deviance, and during this era the prison system identified a subgroup of prisoners as effeminate homosexuals and sent them to tailored facilities where they were subjected to coercive experimentation and behavior modification. The hyper-punitive prison system of 1980’s mass incarceration era sought to warehouse the prison population: in this context, prison staff paid little attention to anyone’s gender specificity. The 21st century prison system has sought to sustain prison legitimacy in the face of challenges, and this has happened in part through assertions of gender progressiveness and the development of transgender prison policy.  

Gender categories are not prior to organizational practice. Categories emerge through organizational practice.

The book also answers the question: How do prisoners navigate gender boundaries? The sociological literature on transgender prisoners—and transgender people more broadly—often privileges identity-based explanations of action. And yet, I found that feminine prisoners made strategic choices about navigating gender boundaries to deal with the pains of confinement and consequences of classification in shifting penal contexts. Prisoners represented their gendered selves to the prison, not just for reasons of recognition or identity validation, but with a mind towards accessing safety, mobility, health, and relationships. These accounts help us understand how individuals navigate organizational gender boundaries to achieve a range of goals, beyond the identitarian.

Our conditions now are quite different from the conditions when I began my research. Perhaps the mid-20th century “rehabilitative” penal regime sounds good, especially compared to draconian forms of policing and incarceration in the present. Hyper-punitive policy can easily prompt nostalgia for what is imagined to have been a kinder bygone era. Yet, my book shows us that even nominally benevolent penal regimes are experienced by incarcerated people as deeply violent. And this matters when it comes to our theory of change.

Polices that expand transgender prisoners’ access to medical care or self-determined housing options can provide vital relief. But transgender-specific reforms will not address core aspects of carceral power that make trans people vulnerable to harm, like the extreme power that prison guards hold over incarcerated people. For those of us concerned about criminalized trans people, it’s important to think beyond tailored gender reforms and to ask about shrinking the power and capacity of prisons themselves.    

History can help us ask these bigger questions, because history makes one alive to the ways that a present status quo can transform into a previously unthinkable future. There can be no blasé indifference to warning signs, no tepid assurances that things will surely continue as they are. History tells us that radical change, for better or worse, is always possible. This can be a scary proposition. But I hope we might also take courage from it, and ask what worlds we really want to build, knowing that even unthinkable futures can become reality.