Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Captive GendersRisks of Current Infectious Disease Protocols and LegislatureThe sexual environment of prison is overwhelmingly non-consensual,lacking in safe-sex paraphernalia, and transphobic. Legislation, like theStop AIDS in Prison Act 2009 (HR 1429) that mandates testing uponprisoner intake, have not become law. Even as this Act and other similarlegislation that includes sexual education, counseling, and sex barrier distributionexist, the clauses that require mandatory testing alongside otherintake steps are concerning. Harm reduction counseling, proven to lowersex, drugs, and lifestyle risks, has been eliminated in some US countyhospitals that are performing mandatory testing upon intake. The testingsessions are “streamlined,” and it’s likely that greater ignorance aroundpeople’s sex or drug harms will accompany the assembly-line testing procedure.Equally precarious, the test result information is then in the handsof the prison intake officer, and in the case of prison testing they wouldgive the state this information. 3In prison, streamlined HIV testing alongside “housing segregation”for HIV-positive people could, as Kim Love suggested, expose them togreater harassment and violence. There is social stigma from the generalprison population that can visibly note who is “segregated” or living withHIV. Love speaks to some benefits of resisting such public labeling (confidentialityand a form of protection by cisgendered cell-mates) that occurswith housing segregation. An isolated placement can also be a further opportunityfor behind the scenes sexual violations from prison staff.The confidentiality of a prisoner’s status can similarly be jeopardizedby forcing people to wait in line to receive medication, if HIV medicationsare in fact being distributed. Laura McNighe and Pascal Emmetconsistently observed confidentiality breaches with HIV medical careinside Pennsylvania prisons. Other prisoners have direct visibility ofmedications in integrated medication lines; segregated medication linesare typically structured around viral conditions and thus create a nonconsensualsystem of visual disclosure for all prisoners living with viralconditions. Guards often distribute medications, even though they haveno formal training to do so.V-Coding WomenAs Kim Love’s experience shows, it is a prison industrial complex norm touse women’s bodies in unsafe ways to pacify male inmates. The prison staffand the PIC create sexually opportune environments (e.g., cage womenin the same cells as straight men), coerce women into having unsafe sex228