The Feminization of Transgender Women in Prisons for Men: How Prison as a Total Institution Shapes Gender

• DOI: 10.1177/1043986219894422
• Author: Valerie Jenness,Julie Gerlinger
• Date: 01 May 2020
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1043986219894422

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2020, Vol. 36(2) 182 –205

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/1043986219894422

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Article

The Feminization of

Transgender Women in

Prisons for Men: How

Prison as a Total

Institution Shapes Gender

Valerie Jenness1 and Julie Gerlinger2

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the degree to which prison shapes transgender women’s

perceptions of themselves as gendered people in prisons for men. Drawing on original

data collected from 315 transgender women in 27 prisons for men in California, a

mixed-methods analysis reveals that transgender women in prisons for men report

higher levels of self-perceptions of femininity while incarcerated, especially for those

who report sexual victimization by other prisoners. The implications of these and

other findings are discussed in light of recent calls for more theory and research on

femininities as well as the policies and practices that undergird prisons as one of the

most sex-segregated institutions.

Keywords

corrections, femininity, gender, prisons, transgender

Introduction

For decades social science research has revealed the multitude of ways organizations

shape social identities and subjectivities; indeed, it is a sociological truism that orga-

nizational context matters when it comes to understanding individual and collective

perceptions of ourselves. This is particularly pronounced when the organizational con-

text is understood to be a total institution—in the classic Goffmanian (1961) sense of

the term—and when the dimensions of the self are interwoven with major axes of

1University of California, Irvine, USA

2The University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA

Corresponding Author:

Valerie Jenness, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-7080, USA.

Email: jenness@uci.edu

894422CCJXXX10.1177/1043986219894422Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeJenness and Gerlinger

research-article2020

Jenness and Gerlinger 183

differentiation that define larger stratification orders, such as age, race, class, gender,

and nationality. As decades of research reveal, this truism is certainly the case with

prisons as a total institution and gender as both an organizing principle of prison life

and a key dimension of prisoners’ identities and subjectivities.

A high profile example of how prison life contextualizes identity and attendant

subjectivities appeared in a front page story in The New York Times. With the headline

“Transgender Woman Cites Attacks and Abuse in Men’s Prisons,” this article reported

in stark terms how prison provides a context for the “deliberate defeminizing” of

transgender women (Sontag, 2015, p. 1). The article told Ashley Diamond’s story:

“Ordered to strip alongside male inmates, she froze but ultimately removed her long

hair and the Hannah Montana pajamas in which she had been taken into custody, she

said. She hugged her rounded breasts protectively” (Sontag, 2015, p. 1). Thus began

the 3 years of abuse that included the denial of hormone therapy, near constant sexual

harassment, and repeated targeting for sexual assault while in a Georgia prison for

men.

Ms. Diamond also secretly made a video from inside the prison in which she was

incarcerated. She describes the horrors of “sexual violence as a way of life” in the

prison for men and the consequences of being denied the medically necessary hor-

mone therapy she had been taking for 17 years:

Not only has my body made dreadful changes, but the effects of not having hormones

have caused the dysphoria of my condition to deteriorate. My body shape has changed

and so too has the way my skin looks and feels. Morally and ethically, everything that has

happened to me is wrong. (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2015)

After being released from prison, she explained that “the state of Georgia was going to

make a man out of me” (McCray, 2017, p. 1).

This high profile case puts front and center—and makes painfully vivid—an

array of challenges transgender women in men’s prisons face. Most notably, for the

purposes of this article, it raises the issue of “deliberate defeminizing” as a feature

of correctional control for transgender women. To put this issue in context, trans-

gender women are almost always housed in facilities for men (Sumner & Jenness,

2014) and they endure and respond to unique “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes,

2007) borne of the multitude of ways carceral institutions systematically deny their

gender identity and attendant expression. For this and other reasons, Stohr (2015)

calls the carceral environments in which transgender women live a war zone (see

also Lyseggen, 2015; Oparah, 2010; Sevelius & Jenness, 2017). These institutional

spaces are known as locales with exceptionally high sexual assault rates for trans-

gender women in prison (Jenness et al., 2019; Jenness & Fenstermaker, 2016;

Meyer et al., 2017).

This article draws on original and official data to empirically assess the degree to

which prison—as a total institution organized around masculinity and heteronorma-

tivity—shapes transgender women’s perceptions of themselves as gendered beings.

Specifically, we ask: do prisons for men defeminize transgender women, enhance