In late 2011, as Chelsea Manning awaited trial at the military corrections complex at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, she received a book from an anonymous sender called “Captive Genders,” an anthology of writings about the impact of the prison system on queer and trans people_.__ _Two years later, on August 22, 2013—the day after she was found guilty of multiple charges related to her leaking of classified government documents, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison—Manning publicly came out as a trans woman.
This past November, a second edition of “Captive Genders” was released, with a new essay by Manning about the ways in which the military and the corrections system police gender expression. Manning has felt female since childhood; while in the Army, she was diagnosed with “gender-identity disorder.” But reading “Captive Genders” gave her newfound awareness of institutionalized gender-based violence. The book brings together the work of activists, artists, and academics, many of whom are current or former prisoners; it challenges hierarchies of expertise, presenting recollection, poetry, and theory as equally legitimate mediums for political critique. Communicating through her lawyer, Chase Strangio, of the A.C.L.U., Manning told me that the book “had a forceful and immediate impact on my understanding of myself.” She continued, “It walks readers through the reasons why … the vast majority of us are totally screwed. We don’t have money. We don’t have stable careers or families. We don’t have our own voice in the community. We don’t fit into—and don’t want to fit into—the gendered stereotypes of modern society.”
For prisoners in the United States, many of whom live in solitary confinement or without consistent access to the Internet, hard copies of books, newsletters, and zines are the only reliable way to access contemporary political discourse. It is up to friends, activists, and organizers on the outside to deliver content to those living within prison walls. For Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, the activist-academics who edited “Captive Genders”_,__ _maximum accessibility for people on the inside was one of the project’s core goals. “We knew that if this was a Web-based project, then its circulation inside prisons would be much less,” Stanley told me. “And so the more traditional format of a book seemed vital.” Organizations such as Black & Pink do the work of locating L.G.B.T.Q. prisoners, through surveys and newsletters, but activists and prisoners continually run the risk of having their correspondence confiscated. According to Stanley, since the collection’s initial publication, in 2011, approximately five hundred copies have reached L.G.B.T.Q. prisoners on the inside.
At this point, it is common knowledge that the Unites States prison system incarcerates more people, and for longer periods of time, than any other prison system in the world. What is often referred to as the prison industrial complex is one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries of the past half-century. But while reform-minded politicians typically focus on shortening sentences and improving living conditions, Stanley, Smith, and the dozens of others who contributed to “Captive Genders” argue, through historical analysis and personal experience, that the prison system should be abolished altogether. To shrink, let alone eliminate, the prison system would require a drastic and total restructuring of society. But abolition as a political practice asserts that there is_ _an alternative—that punishment, confinement, and captivity are simply conventions with which many have grown complacent. Abolition envisions a world in which accountability is decoupled from punishment.
Critics working within academia have written extensively about the correlation between race, policing, and incarceration. Scholars of prison studies, such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Michelle Alexander, have used the abolitionist framework to argue that, in the modern era, populations formerly controlled through slavery and colonization—namely, poor black and indigenous peoples—are now controlled through the prison system. But it is only in the past decade that academics have begun to take up the question of how gender identity, particularly for trans and gender-nonconforming people, relates to the prison system. “Captive Genders” is, perhaps, the seminal collection to do this work.
The book makes plain the mechanisms that drive queer and trans people—predominantly those who are poor and of color—into the prison system, and the often insurmountable obstacles that keep them there. In an essay by the academic Stephen Dillon about his correspondence with two imprisoned trans women, he explains how one of the women, referred to as “R,” came to be incarcerated from the age of sixteen. R was born into the foster-care system, where she was neglected and repeatedly sexually assaulted by her foster parents. At the age of sixteen, she escaped an abusive household. As a gender-nonconforming runaway, though, she was unable to find employment; she began stealing in order to survive. This led to her arrest and placement in juvenile hall. When she was released, her lack of education, her police record, and her gender presentation made it impossible to find a job. She was forced to steal, again, and was arrested once more. At the time of R’s correspondence with Dillon, she had spent more than half of her life incarcerated. In prison, she faced multiple assaults from fellow prisoners and guards and contracted H.I.V. In a letter to Dillon, quoted in the essay, she writes, “Life looks so gloomy for a person like me. What did I do to make it this way?” “Captive Genders” shows that stories like R’s are not exceptional; for many Americans, incarceration, not freedom, is their default state.
In the twentieth century, critiques of the prison system’s impact on queer and trans people primarily came from those with first-hand experience—poor queer and trans people of color, often navigating homelessness and the survival economies of sex work. “Captive Genders” includes essays on pre-“Gay Rights” movements in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, where queer street youth organized to protect themselves against police harassment and understood that the state itself was the primary source of violence in their communities. These movements present a stark contrast with modern gay-rights groups that work in tandem with the state, lobbying for legal protections such as hate-crime legislation. Throughout “Captive Genders,”_ _writers contemplate a feeling that the mainstream L.G.B.T.Q. movement has forgotten how many of their people are living within prisons. Dillon quotes a letter from R: “What hurts me the most ... is the lack of knowledge within the gay community in the free world concerning L.G.B.T. people behind bars. It makes me feel like my brothers and sisters in the free-world could care less about us that are behind prison bars, or we must be the forgotten ones.”
The second edition of “Captive Genders” features a new foreword by the black trans activist CeCe McDonald. On a June night in 2011, in Minneapolis, a group of white people began shouting racist and transphobic slurs at McDonald and her friends. The altercation escalated, one of the women smashed McDonald’s face with a glass bottle, and McDonald stabbed and killed one of the men with a pair of small scissors she had for her fashion-school classes. Despite her plea of self-defense, and the bigoted language of her attackers, McDonald was sentenced to forty-one months in prison for second-degree manslaughter. Like all trans women who have not received gender-confirmation surgery, which is often the only form of trans identity formally recognized by the state, McDonald served her time in a men’s prison. Like Manning, McDonald found the first edition of “Captive Genders” central to her political education while incarcerated. “I realized I’d been hoodwinked and I started sharing this knowledge with the other prisoners,” McDonald writes. “I was a trans woman, surrounded by so many men, but they wanted to know who I was as a person.... This surprised me because the media portrays people in prison as angry, evil, and deceiving. For me it was the opposite—those behaviours came from the staff.”
“Captive Genders” contains numerous accounts of prisoners uniting against unjust treatment. The scholar Michelle C. Velasquez-Potts tells the story of Victoria Arellano, a twenty-three-year-old trans Latina woman who died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2007. Arellano was H.I.V.-positive, but was denied medication by officials. While held in a men’s facility, her fellow prisoners organized on her behalf: they took turns tending to her, escorted her to and from the bathroom, and repeatedly agitated for the agency to give her proper care. Despite these efforts, officials continued to deny Arellano medication; she died in custody, handcuffed to a prison bed. (In 2009, a report by Human Rights Watch concluded that health care within U.S. immigrant-detention centers was “dangerously inadequate.”)
In 2015, after a nearly two-year-long legal battle, Chelsea Manning was granted permission by the military to wear cosmetics and feminine undergarments, and to take hormones. She is still not allowed to grow her hair beyond the military-authorized two inches. Like so many other people in the U.S. prison system, she spent many months in solitary confinement, in a facility that refused to acknowledge her gender identity.* “From the start of 2010,” Manning writes in her contribution to the new “Captive Genders” edition, “I have continued to have my gender enforced and regulated (to varying degrees) as being forever and immutably male.” Manning’s battle has been aided by high visibility, a network of support, and legal counsel; the majority of imprisoned queer and trans people navigate the system’s violence in isolation. “Captive Genders” envisions a world in which their lives are not circumscribed by prison.
*This sentence has been changed to clarify that Chelsea Manning is no longer in solitary confinement.
