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It's all but impossible to determine how many transgender people there are. For one thing, definitions of "transgender" vary: Some would count cross-dressers; others would include only those who have had gender reassignment surgery. For another, not all trans people self-identify, or are readily self-identifiable.
Interestingly, the easiest setting in which to count the number of trans people is detention centers for illegal or undocumented immigrants. Trans people, more often than not, flee their native countries because they are transgender and will say as much on applications for documentation--or simply for release from prison.
According to one report, about one out of every 500 detained immigrants is transgender. Yet one out of every 5 cases of sexual abuse in such facilities is committed against transgender detainees.
Those numbers are a reflection of what Jennicet Guiterrez had in mind when she heckled President Obama at a White House reception for LGBT pride month.
"I saw the President come in speaking about gay pride and the progress that's been made," says Guiterrez. The activist at Familia TQLM, an organization that serves LGBTQ Latino/as says she's spoken to "trans women who were released from detention centers" and told about "the abuse and torture they're facing in detention." Hearing their stories, she said, made her want to give them a voice.
Secret Service police escorted her out of the reception but didn't arrest her. And Obama's self-congratulation--whoops, I mean celebration--continued.
In Delaware, as in many other US States, inmates are allowed to change their names only for religious purposes.
Now Governor Jack Markell is backing legislation that, if passed, would allow transgender prisoners to change their names. However, there is no provision in the law for transferring detainees from facilities designated for their birth gender to those reserved for the gender by which they identify.
The, sponsored by Representative James "J.J." Johnson, comes after two courts in The First State blocked a name-change petition from an inmate at the Baylor Women's Correctional Institution. Lakisha Lavette Short, who is serving a 55-year sentence as a repeat offender, identifies as a man and wants to go by the name "Kai".
Last August, Delaware State Supreme Court Judge Jane Brady, in denying Short's petition, wrote that there is no fundamental right to change one's name. She also wrote that the state has legitimate reasons to deny a name change because it "needs the ability to quickly and accurately identify people in prison and on parole". Moreover, she claimed, in essence, that inmates seeking name changes for religious reasons are "in a separate category" because of their First Amendment right to religious freedom.
American Civil Liberties Union lawyers working with Short are arguing that current Delaware law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution because it allows prisoners to change their names for religious, but not any other, reasons.
An earlier version of Johnson's bill would have allowed for the transfer of prisoners from the a facility for one gender to a facility for the other. That part was removed before the bill was introduced.
Two years ago, Governor Markell and other lawmakers approved legislation adding gender identity to the Diamond State's anti-discrimination laws. Let's hope they can continue their good work.
In court documents filed yesterday, the US Justice Department backed a lawsuit brought by a transgender inmate.
Ashley Diamond, a 36-year-old transgender prisoner in the Georgia system, had been undergoing hormone treatments from the time she was a teenager until her internment in a men's prison in 2012. There, her treatments were stopped because, according to officials, she was not identified as trans in her papers.
While it's not something I support, I will say that, in fairness, Georgia's policy is like that of most other states: Prisoners are placed according to the sex on their birth certificate and receive treatments if they are indicated as transgender. (In 2005, Wisconsin stopped treatments for all inmates; a few other states have followed their lead.) Still, according to the Justice Department, ending such treatment is cruel and unusual punishment.
That's not hard to see in Ms. Diamond's case: Since the withdrawal of hormones, she has attempted suicide as well as self-castration and other forms of self-mutilation. And she has been in a nearly constant state of depression.
Needless to say, I think the DoJ is doing the right thing. And they have put the nation's prison systems and jails on notice that policies prohibiting treatment for new prisoners are unconsitutional.
I'm no expert on criminal justice, so take what I'm about to say for what it's worth.
Here goes: I think that any society that imprisons people has to decide what the purpose of incarceration is.
In the US, as in many other countries, we call our system "corrections". From what I understand of psychology, such a term implies that the system is behavioristic in its approach: The behavior of the person arrested is to be corrected. Or, more ideally, some underlying condition or issue that led to the behavior will be corrected.
Those familiar with the system--inmates as well as wardens and guards--say that it almost never happens. Somehow that doesn't surprise me, but that's a discussion for another blog (or book or class!) led by someone more knowledgeable than I am.
Anyway, in other places and times, imprisonment was more frankly a means of vengeance. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, prisons were called "penitentiaries", or places of penance--in other words, a kind of purgatory where the inmate worked off his or her sins.
So why am I talking about these things on this blog? Well, it matters greatly to transgender inmates, most of whom are arrested for doing sex work or other relatively minor crimes. If the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate or reform someone, the inmate's humanity must be respected. Just as a doctors who don't respect their patients have no hope of helping them heal, any system that dehumanizes the people who enter it cannot make those people better than they were when they were brought into it.
Yasir Naqvi understands this. He is the Correction Services Minister in the Canadian province of Ontario. Yesterday, he announced that inmates will be placed in Ontario prisons according to the gender by which they identify themselves rather than their physical sex characteristics. So, for example, someone identified as male on her birth certificate will be incarcerated in a women's prison if she identifies herself as such.
I know that some believe that prisoners are not human beings and will howl that such treatment is "coddling". But they should think about how their tax money is being spent. If something might help prevent recidivism, why not try it--especially if it doesn't cost any more money than doing something that doesn't work.
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