The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world, with approximately 2.2 million people in jails and prisons. Issues of overcrowding, sexual violence, and heavy use of solitary confinement are all common. Transgender people are especially vulnerable in prisons as they are often the subject of humiliation and degradation by inmates and staff, and are placed in facilities which are incongruent with their gender identities. Moreover, many facilities have adopted blanket policies which prevent transgender individuals from receiving appropriate, gender-affirming medical care while they are incarcerated.

The Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 40% of transgender inmates are sexually abused each year by other inmates or staff, and transgender women are 13 times more likely to be assaulted than cisgender men who are detained in all-male prisons.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003, mandated that the U.S. Department of Justice establish standards to detect, prevent, and respond to sexual abuse within all federal and state prison facilities. PREA outlines specific regulations to increase protections for LGBTQ prisoners, and it prohibits prison facilities from housing transgender individuals based on anatomy alone. Despite these regulations, however, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons has issued a Change Notice to the Transgender Offender Manual, automatically assigning individuals to facilities based on biological sex alone, and thereby increasing the likelihood of victimization for all transgender prisoners.

In 2017, the Transgender Offender Manual was released in response to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ findings that one in three transgender prisoners reported sexual victimization by staff or other inmates. The manual was released to facilitate the implementation of PREA in correctional facilities. In May 2018, the Trump administration issued the Change Notice to the Transgender Offender Manual, which instructed correctional facilities to house incarcerated transgender people according to their biological sex; omitting the necessity for individual assessment and increasing the risk of sexual victimization for the transgender population.

Prisons and jails were formerly penalized for not complying with PREA standards, but are now under less legal obligation to ensure the protection of incarcerated transgender people. The Human Rights Watch (2018) stated: “As with the change to Bureau of Prisons (BOP) policy, there is no defensible basis for these decisions. Indeed, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was a leading co-sponsor of PREA when he was in the Senate. BOP’s decision to weaken protections will place transgender people at immediate risk of physical and sexual assault. In light of overwhelming evidence of severe risks in confinement, it should be reversed immediately.”

The rollback of protections for transgender people is indicative of explicit bias within the current administration. By changing the Transgender Offender Manual, the federal government has violated the laws and standards set forth by PREA. We need to urge legislators to repeal this Notice of Change and continue to uphold protections for incarcerated transgender populations.