Monday, February 15, 2010
Transgender Jails in Italy
http://www.womanist-musings.com/2010/02/transgender-jails-in-italy.htmlimage When members of the transgender community are incarcerated it often presents a problem for the penal justice system because it was constructed only to accommodate the male/female binary. This places trans prisoners at particular risk. A trans man who has a vagina would not be safe in an all male prison and pre-op trans women who are placed in male prisons are similarly not not safe. In the U.S quite often the penal system will simply place the trans prisoner in solitary confinement for the majority of their incarceration. Solitary confinement is understood to be a form of torture and yet trans inmates are regularly subjected to this because of a lack of proper facilities. In both Canada and the U.S., inmates have had to sue to maintain their hormone treatments and to complete to their sex reassignment surgeries. Even though there is much medical evidence to affirm that this is indeed a medical condition too often the penal justice system will consider the needs of trans inmates to simply be cosmetic.
