UC Irvine

This study draws on document analysis and in-depth interviews to explore California’s Transgender Respect Agency and Dignity Act—a pathbreaking policy that creates legal and administrative pathways for transgender prisoners to be housed with the gender of their preference. I examine the policy as it emerged—the ways in which it understands and rhetorizes gender and safety and strategizes to resolve the crises facing incarcerated transgender people—and its implementation—and the strategies and logics used to do so—and identify common elements across these domains. I identify four reoccurring methods used to contest transness and gender-nonconformity—the superimposing of gender-nonconformity and criminality, discursive laundering, recentering the needs of other populations, and mythmaking—that ultimately serve as a form of institutional social control which I refer to as categorical precarity. In conclude with what categorical precarity implies about prison reform and transgender futurity.