It seems I may have been semi-gazumped on my own Freedom Of Information requests – yesterday, both The Sun and the Daily Mail published stories about Trans prisoners. As with much published by those papers, it’s not news as the policy has been around in draft form for a couple of years. (PDF link)

I should point out that the guidelines are described by the Ministry of Justice as a “historical” document rather than one that reflects current policy. However, I understand that the document is still available to prison management and does relate fairly closely to what actually happens at the moment. From the point of view of a transitioning prisoner, it is quite problematic in a number of ways.

Firstly, you had better hope you do not get locked up on remand while in the early stages of working things out but before getting referred to a consultant. Section 4.1 states that before you get as far as a trial, they will not generally even consider any requests for medical intervention. Certainly for larger cases, you can end up on remand for months and that is a long, long time for someone suffering from acute gender dysphoria. Combined with the pressure of prison and a court case, I struggle to think that anyone could survive that.

Secondly, the rules for the prison you are located (section 9.1) state that the default assumption is that you will be held in the prison related to birth gender until you are either post-operative or have a GRC. There’s the obvious Catch-22 here that someone needs to pass the “real life test” before surgery or a GRC, which one can’t do while still in the wrong prison. Even apart from that, being in the wrong prison is clearly going to be very stressful. It was ruled in 2009 (In AB vs. the Secretary of State for Justice) that this was inappropriate, even before the Equalities Act 2010 came into force although it’s possible the EA2010 has created new loopholes. Certainly in the recent case of Nina, we’ve seen someone inappropriately put in a male prison despite being fully transitioned.

And there is some very uninformed discussion in section 9.2 about the “risk” of putting a transwoman into a female prison, particularly if they have committed sex crimes and/or are pre-op. This is entirely backwards, as the effects of hormones (Just HRT, but particularly so for anti-androgens) is to reduce sex drive. Indeed, in some countries they have actually been used to “treat” sex offenders to reduce the risk of re-offending. Rather, there is an increased risk of a transwoman being attacked as she will be physically weaker than much of the rest of the population. Conversely, transmen will be being given hormones that will boost sexual and violent urges and make them stronger and would thus seem to pose a greater risk to the population in a female prison if they have been convicted of crimes of a violent or sexual nature, but this is not discussed.

As usual, it is a case of transmen invisibility coupled with the usual cisgendered fear of “men” getting in amongst the women. Straight, cisgendered males seem to struggle – even if they have the best of intentions – with the idea that someone might not be doing this for sexual reasons.

The new plan is apparently “in development” and should be implemented, if it is approved, “early next year”. There does not appear to be any opportunity for Trans groups to have any input into the draft document before it comes into force, something I intend to raise with the Ministry of Justice.

I feel another letter to a minister coming on.

People are probably aware of the Sonia/Nina case, which I’ve blogged about previously but to summarise, a Trans woman was inexplicably put in a male prison. Following that incident, I submitted a Freedom of Information request asking about Prison Service Policy on the matter.

This isn’t the first time the issue of Trans prisoners in the UK has come up. Work by Press for Change on the issue with the Prison Service dates back at least fourteen years. More recently, it came up in September 2009, when a Trans woman won in court against the Prison Service, who had refused to move her to a women’s prison. That resulted in a question in parliament, along with a followup question which between them revealed the existence of a draft Prison Service Order which, it was implied, was close to being finalised.

Over a year on from that case and there isn’t anything published yet. The Ministry of Justice are delaying their response to my request for “a copy of draft PSO 3300 [Guidelines on the Management, Treatment and Care of Prisoners who have or have had Gender Dysphoria] or any other related draft or current PSOs, PSIs or similar guidelines” because they need to consider if it’s in the public interest to release it. To do this, they’re relying on an exception that it’s related to “Formulation of government policy”.

I guess that answers the first part of my question then, relating to the status of the guidelines. It’s still being formulated, over a year later.

This morning’s news is that prisoners are to get the vote. It’s a long running case with the European Courts that started in 2005 and on which the government has finally relented. This is political, so perhaps the change in government to a more liberal one has contributed to this. Conversely, the Conservatives are not known for their positive attitude towards prisoners.

There’s a predictable backlash about people being punished and they should lose their liberty, to which I have one thing to add: Not everyone is in prison for punishment. Some people are on remand and have not been convicted with anything yet and although we sometimes may need to stop people absconding while things progress, they are not (yet) being punished and people that find themselves in this position are already allowed to vote.

However, there are people inside who are there just because it’s considered unsafe to release them, but have served the “punishment” portion of their sentence and at the moment they are deprived of the right to vote. At this point, I feel I should probably plug Ben’s Prison blog, by a serving prisoner who is in exactly this position. I’m sure we’ll see something from him on the topic soon, but it will be delayed somewhat – he has to post his blog posts to someone who actually has internet access, because there is no internet in prisons!

Fifty years ago, we were still locking up people for being gay. I’m sure there are some out there who would rather LGBT folk didn’t get the vote, but unsurprisingly I’m not one of them. Should we also deprive people of the vote for victimless crimes that only exist because they cause moral outrage amongst the masses? After all, they can’t vote to make these things legal because they are in prison and we took that away from them.

And finally, even if you grouped all the prisoners together, they would still not collectively be able to elect more than one MP. I hardly think we’re likely to see anyone overthrowing society just through one MP, but they still deserve some say in how they are treated. Look at yesterday’s case with Nina for an example of why this is important.

Sometimes, I think people want to deprive prisoners of the vote just because they don’t view them as human.

In common with much of the UK Trans community, I’m too angry to write a coherent post about this right now. The Daily Mail have just published an article about the defendant in the recent death on the London Underground also being Trans. This gives them the perfect opportunity to engage in mis-gendering, bad stereotypes and all the other bigotry beloved of that publication, particularly given the possible sex worker angle too. (I’m sceptical on this point, a renowned human rights lawyer would not typically need the extra money)

I’m not just angry with the Mail though, I’m also angry with British Transport Police and the courts. The only reason the press got wind of this story was because the BTP told the press a “man” had gone under the train, in direct contradiction to eyewitnesses who stated it was a woman so they looked into it further. It’s really not hard to write a press release without gendering someone if you’re not mentioning their name anyway – most people won’t even think twice if it fails to mention if it’s a bloke or woman. Via The Sun, whose article is marginally better than the Daily Mail but only just, we know there was no initial confusion that lead to this outing by the police as those on site at the incident initially had no reason to believe she was a Transwoman.

And then we have the courts. We don’t know the full story for now, perhaps it was bought up by the defence team for some reason but if not why did the Courts allow the defendant to be outed in this way? It’s possible this will prejudice any future trial in such a way that it can’t be a fair trial. (It would possibly have to come out anyway as a defence against any allegation that it was a hate crime, but that decision was months away and could have been handled better) Even if it was an accidental outing, the Judge could have prevented the gutter press from reporting that particular fact.

To top it all off, we learn the defendant has been taken to a male prison. I do not know the defendant so I can’t be sure how far down the road to transition they are, but if they are full time this seems grossly inappropriate and may be putting them in serious danger.

And finally, notice that the Daily Mail “reporter” writing the article gets anonymity. One rule for them…