Meet the pioneering transgender inmates who fought for gender-affirming surgery in US prisons
More than a dozen states have enacted policies banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people, as Republicans nationwide have made limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ people a central part of their platform.
However, in US prisons, hardly known for vigorously protecting civil liberties, an unlikely revolution is underway, moving things ever so slowly in the opposite direction. Thanks to a group of pioneering inmates, in the last seven months, the federal prison system provided the first and second ever recorded cases of gender-affirming surgery for its prisoners.
The procedures were a culmination of decades of activism, perseverance, and lawsuits from transgender people in the carcercal system, who fought for legal recognition and dignity at the same time they were fighting for survival, with trans people behind bars facing staggering amounts of violence and sexual abuse.
Nonetheless, despite these milestones, incarcerated people and legal experts say the prison system still barely recognises the basic humanity of trans people, and puts up numerous hurdles to them getting the medical which they need – and which they are entitled to under the US Constitution.
There are an estimated 1,200 transgender people in the US prisons, less than one per cent of the total population behind bars. They may be a small population, but trans people face a disproportionate share of the violence and abuse that plagues the American prison system at large.
Being trans in prison “exponentially increases the risk of being sexually abused and physically abused,” Julie Abbate, national advocacy director at Just Detention International, a human rights organisation which seeks to end sexual abuse in prisons, told The Independent.
More than one third of trans people in prisons and jails experience sexual violence, the highest reported level of any group, according to a 2018 report by the Bureau of Justice. Many struggle to access basic services from prisons, like being housed in the wing matching their gender or getting hormone treatments.
