Washington state’s prison officials forcibly removed a transgender woman from the women’s prison where she had lived for three and a half years and transferred her to a men’s facility last week, marking the first time the agency has removed a transgender person from gender-affirming housing.
In March, the National Review published an inflammatory story about a leaked disciplinary report describing Kim having sex with another woman. The story, which deadnamed and misgendered Kim, included no allegations of assault or non-consensual activity, but suggested that transgender women are “male inmates who identified as women” to sexually exploit incarcerated women.regards incarcerated individuals’ gender identity as confidential information.
The other woman involved in the incident, whom HuffPost is declining to name to protect her privacy, did not respond to a request for comment. “We can plainly see that while DOC is actively parading around its progressive stance towards trans people, what we can see in practice is that it’s extremely tenuous,” said A.D. Lewis, an attorney who used to work with trans people incarcerated in Washington state and now runs the Prison Law Office’s Trans Beyond Bars project. “And that if a trans person allegedly breaks a prison rule, they will be treated differently and punished more harshly than non-trans people.
DOC’s “own policies have come to recognize that trans people exist in prisons and have faced significant danger — and their own decision to transfer Amber to a women’s prison indicates their recognition that she is, in fact, a trans woman who faces danger in men’s prisons,” said Dean Spade, a professor at Seattle University School of Law.