Sense and Solidarity in the Debate on Transgender Prisoners

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I agree with Richard Garside’s (Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice) helpful suggestion that the pressing practical problem of whether male-born transgender women should be housed in women’s prisons should be settled, in particular cases, by soliciting the views of women prisoners themselves. It is a ragged, imperfect solution, but no better (more ethical) options are currently available to the Prison Service, once trans women sentenced to custody, rightly or wrongly,  have become their responsibility. I also agree with Garside’s  readiness to use the prefix “male-born” in this debate; it is more or less relevant in different situations, and may actually be irrelevant in some, but the sexual assaults perpetrated by male-born Karen White in New Hall women’s prison understandably put it on the policy agenda. Sarah Lamble, anticipating that such limited prison democracy will always lead to the rejection of  trans women, has accused Garside of falsely polarising the interests of transgender women and women prisoners, and of bad faith: “Keeping prisoners in conflict with one another”, she says, “and whipping up fear of marginalised groups is a classic strategy to ensure prisoners don’t collectively challenge the system that is actually the real source of harm against them”. I don’t think that’s what Garside was doing. 

Lamble’s critique of Garside’s argument isn’t premised on the constraint of what is or should be currently available to the Prison Service and moves away from practical issues to paint a bigger political picture of what is at stake, perfectly valid, if not beyond contention. She reframes Garside’s concern from a theoretical standpoint which is far removed from his, indeed its polar opposite, bluntly premised on the notion that ‘trans women are women’, as if this were both self-evidently true and intrinsically progressive, disdaining disagreement with this as a “noxious” thought-crime. From such an abstract standpoint, any non-trans women prisoners and penal reformers who question the right of male-born trans women to share penal space are easily rendered misguided, un-woke and pernicious. The fact is, this “no-difference” view of trans women is by no means axiomatic and is not simply made so by forcefully insisting upon it. It is contested by sufficient numbers of women, and by enough feminists with progressive credentials, so I don’t feel entirely uncomfortable questioning its progressive potential myself.

Gender fluidity is a given and must be accommodated by societies: it will be a struggle on multiple levels. But the case for arguing that trans people should be treated with dignity and respect and, when vulnerable, entitled and enabled to be  safe – if that is what is at issue here – does not depend on a claim that they are exactly the same as people whose gender identity is comfortably and perhaps unthinkingly tied to their biological sex. Social acceptance on these terms would be too long coming; some, probably the majority, of non-trans people would not accept the truth of it. Transgender people can and should be respected and accepted regardless of their difference. “We are all more simply human than otherwise”, Harry Stack Sullivan used to say, and the forms in which our humanity is acceptably expressed are more varied than we used to think.   

If, for Lamble, there is more than respect for difference at issue here – if her argument is that the activism of transgender people is intended to relativise and disrupt all prevailing conceptions of gender identity, and that this is desirable because a)  that is the only way transgender people will feel or be fully recognised or b) some kind of collective human liberation would result from it, well, let that argument proceed in the spaces that are open to it. I’d rather the lives of people in prison were not pressed into service to advance this  larger argument, because most trans people will not find themselves in prison. Let’s not pretend that, whatever new social and psychological possibilities the “no-difference” argument opens up, that its articulation helps to address the specific practical problem  that Garside was wanting to solve. Equally, let’s not pretend that seeking tenable  solutions to here and now problems – reducing fear and harm, settling interpersonal and institutional conflicts, as far as they can be – always forecloses necessary, longer term political change. It might, but it need not. The tension here is an old one, and the advice Stan Cohen (1988) offered years ago in It’s All Right for You to Talk, adapting Mathiesen’s idea of “the unfinished”– warning practitioners not to heed the kind of theory which  requires sacrificing here and now kindness, empowerment (or democracy) for the sake of putative political transformation in the future – remains valid. Combine the two. Let the former inform the latter. Be the change you want to make.

Difference is defensible. Whilst the parallel is inexact, colourblindness – seeing no difference – proved limited, and often offensive, as a pseudo-form of anti-racism, and I need convincing that transgender politics will play out differently, if difference is denied and nominal assimilation into the gender mainstream made into the core demand. The denial of difference by male-born transgender women and their academic allies can create strange optics: it can all too easily look like a covert, patriarchal colonisation, or appropriation of female subjectivity and female space, which is why some feminists are, at the very least, wary of it. This may not accord at all with the inner experience or aspirations of some, even most, transgender women, but it seems unwise to rule out the psychological possibility of it, and the oppressive actions towards vulnerable women that might flow from it. Transgender women need not be depicted as paragons of virtue or expected to affect a persistently gentle demeanour in order to gain moral recognition, but  as Lamble rightly says, “the reality is that hurt people often hurt other people. These painful enactments of trauma are prevalent in women’s prisons and will play out whether trans women are present or not”. All true, but what if this already bleak scenario is compounded by a traumatised trans woman? What state of mind, exactly, was Karen White in when she committed those sexual assaults? Who did she think she was?  

Lamble pushes the implications of her “no-difference” argument to extremes, believing, it seems, that she is wielding the sword of truth against a deluded and indifferent hegemony. It’s not the way to win friends and influence people. “These groups” she says, “feed false claims that trans rights and women’s rights are in conflict with one another, despite the fact that many women-only organisations and service providers have been successfully operating with trans inclusive policies for decades.” The a priori judgement that false claims are being made here – the “no difference” notion, again – hinders clarity of thought: in the abstract it may be the case that trans rights and women’s rights don’t conflict (both can be grounded in human rights), but in specific concrete circumstances, depending on what the particular individuals perceive, need and want, they might well conflict. That conflict then has to be practically addressed, not just theorised, or reframed. Lamble’s point that “many women-only organisations and service providers” have become trans inclusive is relevant but not decisive: as she  is elsewhere keen to affirm, prisons are not spaces like any other, and what works in other organisations can’t simply be assumed to work equally well in them. But – sometimes – they just might, and I’m not quite as negative as she is about the prospect of women prisoners democratically accepting a trans woman alongside them (see Kushner 2018). It would need to be a carefully managed process, and acceptance  would not always be the outcome. The response to rejection needs consideration. Lamble’s warning about setting precedents for prisoners to “democratically” include and exclude other categories of disliked people is fairly made, awkward but probably not intractable. 

Solidarity on the Left – if that is where Lamble positions herself – is notoriously friable, and it never helps to misrepresent putative allies. Lamble claims that Garside “selectively takes the problematic behaviour of some individuals and attaches it to trans identities as a whole. Such framings portray trans women as if they are the greatest threat to non-trans women in prison”. I don’t see Garside doing this at all: he focussed very specifically on “the problematic behaviour of some individuals” and proposed a practical, raggedly  democratic solution to that possibility. Nowhere does he imply “that women’s prisons are places of ‘safety and refuge’ until trans women come along”. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is well aware of the limits and deficiencies of women’s prison’s, and equally concerned that we “create real places of safety and healing in our communities”. It will take serious, relentless political struggle to do that and a high degree of solidarity among activists will be needed to mobilise consensus on it. Whatever its merit in advancing transgender interests more generally, I’m not sure that Lamble’s critique of Garside, for all its intellectual bravura, actually gets us closer to that.

References

Cohen S (1988) It’s Alright for You to Talk: Political and Sociological  Manifestos for Social Work Action.  Oxford:  Transaction Books.

Kushner R (2018) The Mars Room. London: Jonathan Cape

Mike Nellis is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice in The Centre for Law, Crime and Justice at the University of Strathclyde.