In a shocking report, we’re learning about the firsthand consequences of following Trump’s anti-trans executive order concerning incarcerated trans women.
A vigorous report by journalists Maddy Castigan and Tom Sayers uncovers a pattern of widespread abuse, torture, and rape of trans women in Maryland prisons, where incarcerated individuals are housed “according to genitalia,” leaving women without the means to access gender-affirming surgery and care stuck in men’s prisons and subjected to v-coding.
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A 2023 report found “that trans prisoners filed 34 sexual abuse or harassment complaints over three years, despite the prison system only housing an average of 73 trans inmates over the same period of time—over eighteen times the number of complaints filed by cisgender prisoners per capita,” as reported by Castigan.
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Maryland is far from the only state where incarcerated trans women are thrown to the wolves. In Florida, where anti-trans laws and bathroom bans threaten to turn a trip to the public restroom into a felony, women are faced with similar human rights abuses in the prison system.
While the report cited by Castigan is from 2023, before the current administration began its aggressive attack on trans lives, the problems detailed are still an issue to this day, even despite AG Anthony Brown’s denouncement of Trump’s anti-trans policies.
“Despite repeated promises for reform,” Castigan writes, “the report reveals that abuse complaints have not declined, and the number of trans people placed in “administrative segregation,” a form of solitary confinement, has skyrocketed.”
Sadly this, too, is a common inhumane “fix” to the problem of trans women being forced to live in men’s prisons. Instead of advocating for a woman to be transferred to the correct facility, she’s “protected” by being placed in solitary confinement, a brutal punishment that leaves the women isolated and cut off from human contact.
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