Revisiting an Interview with Dr. Susan Stryker on Transgender Incarceration

The day before George Floyd was murdered, I emailed Dr. Susan Stryker, on a whim, to see if it would be possible to interview her on how the criminal justice system works against transgender people. It was late May, and we were already several months into the pandemic, though certainly not so far along in the nightmare that the extraordinary exception to life as usual had begun to feel like a new, if perverse, norm. Given the social claustrophobia of that time, when the constraints of the pandemic were still too fresh to be taken for granted, I may have simply been looking for excitement. In any case, she rejected my interview request within hours of my sending it. There was not enough time that week.

In May, I was covering prison conditions, which were not good, indeed, had never been good, and certainly were not getting any better. The crisis, then simmering, would boil over into public consciousness in June, when Vice News published a video, leaked from inside a California prison, showing crowded conditions and people afraid for their lives. In Georgia, the situation was not any better. The AJC was reporting crowded conditions despite calls for early releases, and the state’s Department of Corrections’ website increasingly announced the deaths of older prisoners from COVID-19. Accounts of Georgia prisons from before the pandemic indicated generally unsanitary conditions, especially at the infamous Augusta State Medical Prison, the only hospital prison in Georgia. To make matters worse, there was no mass COVID-19 testing program in place for incarcerated people in the state, aside from the testing of new intakes at two diagnostic prisons, creating a situation where the spread of the virus would go underreported. We already knew prisons would be death traps, but in the absence of any accountability for their conditions, there is no impetus but mere public embarrassment to force change.

While the AJC was reporting about general prison conditions, I was trying to find out the specific effects of the pandemic on LGBTQ prisoners in Georgia. LGBTQ people in prison are marginalized in complex and intersecting ways, one simultaneous cause and symptom of which is a lack of news coverage on their specific situation. This absence of news is actually self-reinforcing because journalists rely on each other’s work in order to gain background knowledge on the subjects we cover, including where one might be able to find sources. The lack of news articles on the subject forced me to search for other entry ways into researching the issue. For all I know Dr. Stryker has never set foot in Georgia, but she has written about the violence transgender people face in the prison system. Her knowledge of the background on transgender incarceration was what I needed.

On the 26th of May, I emailed Dr. Striker back to see if an interview would be possible given more time. The news of Floyd’s murder and the first wave of protest in Minneapolis was just being reported. I cannot say for certain whether I absorbed it before or after writing the interview questions. Fortunately, the topic proved relevant. That evening, my brother told me about what had happened, and while the scale of the protest then already underway in Minneapolis was impressive, the significance of the moment was not yet evident. We did not yet know that this time, after so many instances of fatal police violence against Black people, this time it would spark a national outrage commensurate with the injustice.

Two weeks and a different world later, Dr. Stryker would return my interview questions with answers appropriate to our new context. The interview consequently spans a moment in time that marks the beginning of a major societal transformation. It has been reproduced below with the consent of Georgia Voice.

The following interview has been edited only for spelling. Portions of this interview were originally published in Georgia Voice on June 18th, 2020 and can be read here.

For many younger people in the Queer community, like myself, it is easy to forget that less than two decades ago homosexuality, and not just same-sex marriage, was essentially illegal in many states. In your book, Transgender History,you write about how being transgender, or LGB for that matter, has been criminalized in the past. Could you write about how that history of criminalization still effects LGBTQ people today?

It’s important to recognize a few things here: first, that the law only gets you so far. Some of the most important anti-trans actions are extra-judicial; that is, they take place outside the scope of law, and are not remedied by law. The law can’t make somebody not feel or act transphobically, or anticipate in advance how to prevent or address every instance of this. Second, the very logic of legal, bureaucratic, administrative, or institutional forms of power can be hostile to trans people, and are not going to save us; this is especially important to keep in mind when thinking about policing and incarceration—these are not solutions for injustices, but problems that cause injustice for trans people. Finally, what laws do exist that offer limited legal protections for trans people are not evenly distributed, either by jurisdiction or demographics. There are very few federal level protections, and they are actively being eroded or overturned. Some states and cities do better on this than others. It’s far easier for white trans people to be able to claim the protection of the law, than for people of color, particularly Black and indigenous people, to do so. The history of criminalization still affects trans and queer people today because it’s not history—it’s still our present.

Following up on that, how does the continued criminalization of prostitution uniquely effect transgender people, and particularly those in our community who are not white?

Trans women, especially trans women of color, face so many barriers to “normal life”—familial rejection, housing and employment discrimination, loss or lack of educational opportunity, heightened vulnerability to policing and incarceration, that they disproportionately wind up in sex-work. One of the most important societal changes that could immeasurably improve the quality of live for trans women of color would be to decriminalize prostitution, and to provide support for either doing that work safely or creating pathways towards other kinds of work.  

We often take for granted that transgender people facing incarceration will be sent to the wrong gender of jail or prison. Could you write about why the practice is so commonplace as well as the violence it engenders?

I think there are two or three different levels of explanation here. One is simply that prisons as social institutions replicate socially dominant ways of understanding sex/gender. We live in a society that believes our personhood or citizenship or social status is this regard is fundamentally determined by our genitals. Second, it’s important to remember that prisons are designed for punishment, and a great many practices in prisons are explicitly or implicitly aimed at tearing people down in the name of “correcting” them. How trans people’s gender expression and identity are undermined in prison is part of this overarching punitive intention. Third, I think it can express an unconscious (or sometimes conscious) sadism that imagines incarcerated trans people as utterly powerless targets for acting out one’s fantasies of domination and control. Sickness plus misguided intent plus uninterrogated social norms all add up to a hegemonic form of oppression and violence that lands very heavily on trans people in prison. It is truly a form of “cruel and unusual punishment” that should be abolished.   

It often seems that the law assumes gender to be binary and biologically fixed. Do you think being transgender inherently challenges hetero/cis-normative legal structures, and if so, to what effect?

Yes. Even for trans people who have binary identities and are cis-passing, I think being trans fundamentally challenges the cultural assumption that there is anything fixed, natural, or inevitable about our sex/gender classifications. We represent a difficult problem for the routine administrative practices of the state.

Historically, and in the present, how have LGBTQ and particularly transgender people fought against criminalization and incarceration? You have extensively documented the Compton Cafeteria uprising; what, in your opinion, are the best modern examples of transgender people organizing to oppose legal discrimination in policing and the justice system?

I can think of no better example than the moment in which we live right now: the participation of trans people in social movements for racial justice, particularly Black liberation, and calls to abolish the police and the prison-industrial complex. I’m very inspired by what’s happening in Minneapolis, with elected officials promising to defund the police, and in Seattle, where protestors have set up an “autonomous zone” to begin imaging together what a free and just society can look like. It’s highly likely that later this month the Supreme Court is going to rule that trans people are not protected from discrimination by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It will be interesting to see if that formal denial of rights will open up a new front in the justice-struggles we see unfolding all around us right now. It could provide an opportunity for an even more deeply intersectional politics aimed at the transformation of the “bio-centric” modern world order, which imagines our flesh as an unalterable anchor for our social positionality and arguably emerged from the transatlantic slave trade. Transness is ultimately the promise that flesh can come to signify otherwise, and that the meanings attached to our bodies can change.

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Upcoming article on January 31st, 2021: “On the Possibility of the Transnormative”