Transphobes Discover U. S. Prison Conditions, Blame Trans Women
Widespread sexual assault in women’s prisons is an ongoing human rights crisis. Anti-trans propagandists portray it as trans people’s fault.
by Evan Urquhart
Conditions in U. S. prisons have been so bad for so long that a sustained movement for prison abolition has grown up in response. Proponents believe our prison system is so despicable and inhumane that it cannot be reformed. This has come in response to well-known problems, going back decades, which include high rates of violence and sexual assault (both inmate-on-inmate and violence from guards), overcrowding, lack of medical care, poor food, and indifference (or sometimes retaliation) to most inmate complaints. The system in California specifically is so broken it has resulted in a Supreme Court order to release tens of thousands of prisoners. There are regular stories in the news of hunger strikes and other acts of desperation from people imprisoned in the U. S. seeking to draw attention to the horrific state of affairs.
An article in the conservative Washington Free Beacon seems to have freshly discovered these problems, but only the tiny subset which involve complaints by cisgender women prisoners against trans women they have been incarcerated with.
The Free Beacon bases its reporting on a lawsuit against the state of California that seeks to overturn a law that requires transgender inmates to be housed in facilities that correspond to their gender. Since the law went into effect in 2021, only 342 of the tens of thousands of inmates incarcerated in men’s prisons in California have requested a transfer to a women’s facility, and just 47 of the transfers have been approved. (This is all according to the Free Beacon’s own reporting.)
The Free Beacon did not include any details about the lawsuit, which other sources report is being sponsored by the anti-trans hate group Women’s Liberation Front. Instead, it quotes from court documents related to the case as if they constitute new reporting, without explaining who is bringing the lawsuit, or when it began:
screenshot from the Washington Free Beacon
The Free Beacon’s reporter, Susannah Luthi, also seems completely unaware of the ongoing campaign to raise awareness about the high rate of sexual assault in U. S. women’s prisons. Such assaults often occur the hands of male guards, and go unreported for fear of retaliation. Inmate-on-inmate sexual assault in women’s prisons is also believed to be extremely high. One 2006 study found such assaults were four times more likely to occur in women’s facilities than in men’s facilities. Because transgender women prisoners are so rare (and were even less likely to be housed in women’s prisons in 2006), it’s clear that almost all inmate-on-inmate sexual assaults involve two cis women.
Luthi also writes that prisons have ignored or retaliated against lawsuit participants who have complained about sexual misconduct or assault. This is a huge problem in American prisons. It’s a cornerstone of stories about prison abuse, that complaints about abuses so often result in retaliation. The story in the Free Beacon acts as if it’s a new and unusual phenomenon that is happening because prison guards favor trans women prisoners.
screenshot from the Washington Free Beacon
In the end, the Washington Free Beacon provides a misleading description of one of the many ways prisons in the U. S. genuinely fail to provide for the safety of inmates. It correctly notes that complaints are often ignored or met with retaliation. Reporting like this makes it less likely that conditions will improve, because it ignores sexual assaults by guards and cisgender women, instead treating a widespread systemic issue as if it’s brand new, and a byproduct of a tiny number of trans women who have been housed with other women, instead of in men’s prisons. The piece also ignores the vulnerability of trans women in men’s prisons. In California, 59 percent of transgender prisoners say they’ve been sexually assaulted within a correctional facility.