A federal appellate court ruled last week that Oregon may house trans women inmates in men’s prisons, overturning a lower court’s ruling earlier this year.
The three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals consisted exclusively of Donald Trump appointees. They voted unanimously to overturn an April ruling from U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke ordering the Oregon Department of Corrections to assume that trans women prisoners should be housed in women’s prisons, and then assess individual cases to confirm that placement, not the other way around.
Oh my God …
Like you caught me off guard with the Wikipedia link and I expected the “This page is a stub” not enough references thing…
Nope this is a thing, it’s well documented and absolutely insane.
Yeah, I like to include the Wikipedia link when I talk about it specifically for that reason. It’s a bold claim and while it’s believable, it’s easy to imagine it’s something we only know about through stories and community knowledge. But no, this is a real, documented pattern of direct targeted harm done through an apparatus of state power. It takes this issue from one of theoretical harm to documented systems of harm.
Where trans women are in the prison system we need programs to protect us from such behaviors. In places where it isn’t politically or legally feasible to house us in women’s prisons we should at the bare minimum be kept from being forced to share a cell or other places of vulnerability (such as shared showers) with men.
We also need to combat the prevalence of prison rape in all cases and the sadism of prison guards. But those alone aren’t a replacement for targeted opposition to v-coding and the conditions that enable it.