Which State Is Torturing Trans Prisoners Today? Is It Florida?
SPOILER: It is Florida.
There is no cutting to the chase on this one, it is ALL chase: Florida is using its recent law banning public funds’ use to provide or promote trans health care as an excuse to go much, much further. In its latest expression, the state is torturing trans prisoners in its state “corrections” system.
The Marshall Project, named after Thurgood Marshall and a consistently great source of news on prisons, prisoners, and criminal justice, published a piece that is absolutely chilling to anyone trans or who has had to stand up for their right to express the deep and important parts of themselves that people in power would prefer stay hidden. Their first paragraph is too powerful not to repeat in full:
Earlier this fall, Florida officials ordered transgender women in the state’s prisons to submit to breast exams. As part of a new policy for people with gender dysphoria, prison medical staff ranked the women’s breast size using a scale designed for adolescents. Those whose breasts were deemed big enough were allowed to keep their bras. Everyone else had to surrender theirs, along with anything else considered “female,” such as women’s underwear and toiletry items.
Somehow, prison officials have decided, soap scented with hibiscus and lavender is a grave security threat in men’s prisons but not women’s.
While the state of Florida and prisons around the US have long and horrifying histories of mistreatment of trans prisoners, this latest crackdown on harmless personal belongings is part of a new approach to punishing trans prisoners that somehow goes even further than the new health policy directive that supposedly requires it.
The directive is, and it’s hard to overstate here, bad. It requires anyone in the prisons to undergo a year of psychotherapy whose intent is to “resolve” gender dysphoria before “variances” like prescribing hormones can be considered. This is mandatory even if they’ve received more than a year of psychotherapy previously, even if they have medical records going back decades and, shockingly, even if those medical records are the prison’s own. That’s right, as implemented, the diagnosis of a prisoner by the prison health system combined with a history of psychotherapy and positive response to hormones is insufficient to even consider continued prescribing.
But wait! It gets worse!
All identified medical and psychiatric comorbidities must first be addressed. As appropriate, psychiatric comorbidities should be addressed through psychotherapy, psychotropic medication, or other appropriate medically accepted interventions. Once these medical and psychiatric comorbidities are resolved and ruled out as the potential cause of the Gender Dysphoria, further treatment for Gender Dysphoria may proceed. [Emphasis Wonkette’s.]
Comorbidities, for those not in the know, have multiple definitions, but the concern here is that the most common definition is simply any conditions that co-occur with any other conditions. If you have gender dysphoria and the common cold, your virologist would tell you that gender dysphoria is a comorbidity, while your psychologist would tell you that the cold is one. Considering that and noting that the policy above says comorbidities must be resolved and ruled out as a cause of dysphoria (rather than “or” ruled out), the policy here is pretty clear that if you have a bruise on your foot you can’t be treated for gender dysphoria — other than mandatory psychotherapy — until the bruise is resolved.
This may seem an insane interpretation of the document, but the document itself is that extreme. Although it contemplates “variances” from the standard treatment regimen of psychotherapy, it also specifically bans granting variances except as necessary “to comply with the Constitution or a court order.” In other words, the state won’t even do the work to consider whether hormones *might* be prescribed until forced to do so. So to get hormones requires a year of therapy, then a lawsuit and appeals, then an evaluation — likely negative — and then a new suit over any negative evaluation. It’s not exaggerating to say this might take a decade.
As for the therapy required, while the UN has identified conversion therapy as torture, Florida has identified it as required treatment. The directive itself isn’t as plainly written as to say that the required psychotherapy is conversion therapy, but every indication in the document and in the actions documented by The Marshall Project is clear: The state intends to stop people being trans.
Transgender women who attended the meetings said they were told by officials that everyone identifying as transgender would be “re-evaluated” to assess whether they can have continued access to the care and accommodations they had been receiving, such as permission to grow their hair long. […]
Since then, more than a dozen transgender people said corrections officers ordered them to cut their hair. Mariko Sundwall told The Marshall Project that she was given a disciplinary infraction and spent 10 days in solitary confinement for refusing to cut her hair before officers put her in handcuffs and led her to the prison barber where her hair was cropped short.
Of course bad treatment of prisoners isn’t limited to trans people. Others have faced similar abuses. Rastafarians have had their heads shaved despite a case history documenting a religious right to keep their hair in dreadlocks. Muslims have been forcibly shaved. Nor have prisons respected the right to wear harmless articles of clothing in a manner that should be constitutionally protected. In 2014 Wyoming prisons denied at least one orthodox Jewish prisoner the right to wear a head covering called a kippah even as other prisoners were allowed to wear baseball caps. While religious rights are better documented than the right to choose one’s own underwear, the callousness in Wyoming towards Judaism is perfectly parallel with that in Florida towards trans people.
Fights for trans rights frequently end up protecting everyone with a gender. The abuses in Florida are particularly nasty, and will require a particularly fierce fight to end. The ACLU filed Keohane v Dixon on October 25. Let’s hope for all our sakes that they win.
PREVIOUSLY ON TRANS PRISONERS AND FLORIDA FUCKERY!
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"prison medical staff ranked the women’s breast size"
That. Is. Sick...
/For. Fuck's. Sake...