In the past several years, The Marshall Project made a commitment to center the voices of incarcerated trans people. This is both in service to the incarcerated people themselves, and to our readers who are hungry for information about a topic that is much-discussed but often misunderstood.
For “What Being Trans in Prison Is Really Like,” we gathered voices of trans people in prisons across the country: a trans man in Georgia, and trans women in Texas, Tennessee and Florida. For this series of “as told to” essays, we let people speak in their own words about their journeys. To accompany the essays, we included audio clips (using a custom-built audio player) so readers could hear each person’s voice. We also commissioned queer artist Chris Cortez to draw portraits of each person as they would want to be seen if they had more control over their appearance: what jewelry, makeup, clothing and hairstyle they would choose if they were not incarcerated. One recurring theme of the essays: When prison systems refuse to let trans people live authentically and safely as themselves, that refusal becomes part of their punishment.
Then, in October, reporter Beth Schwartzapfel introduced readers to Grace Pinson, a transgender woman who had sued the federal Bureau of Prisons over 100 times during her almost 20 years in federal prison. She sued officials for refusing to provide her with adequate gender-affirming care. For refusing to move her to a women’s prison. For failing, again and again, to keep her safe. After losing again and again, Pinson became a dogged and effective jailhouse lawyer who brought two cases to trial last year and won them both without an attorney or any formal legal training. The story was a profile of Pinson and also shined a spotlight on the dangers of life in federal prison for transgender women—and why, even in a place whose purpose is punishment, accountability for harm is so hard to come by. “Assaulted by Her Cellmate, a Trans Woman Took the Federal Prisons to Court” was co-published with Mother Jones and Arizona Luminaria, assuring both a national audience and a local one in the state where the assault at the heart of the story took place.
We followed it up with “3 Things to Know About Prison Violence Against Transgender People,” published 11/13/2024. This piece made the key takeaways from the Pinson profile easily digestible for those who were short on time, namely that transgender women in men’s prisons are a ready target for extortion, exploitation and assault, and that the tools that are meant to provide prevention and accountability—federal law and the federal courts—are largely ineffective at either.
In “New Florida Prison Policy on Trans Health Care ‘Like Conversion Therapy,'” published 12/10/2024 in partnership with the Tampa Bay Times, Schwartzapfel detailed how the new policy essentially eliminated all gender-affirming care except for psychotherapy—leading critics to accuse the state of trying to “cure” people’s gender identity.
