Categorical Exclusions: How Racialized Gender Regulation Reproduces Reentry Hardship

• In Event: 4361 - Inequalities, the Life Course, and Problematizing the Ways ‘the System’ Works for Trans People

Abstract

Gender organizes key reentry services like housing, meaning that formerly incarcerated people seeking resources must successfully inhabit a gender category. Drawing on 7-months of ethnography and 79 interviews with service providers and formerly incarcerated transgender people, I show that these organizational practices of gender categorization are racialized and meaningfully impact resource access. First I show how gender-segregated housing programs rely on biology-based definitions of gender. These gender rules created workable options for trans men to stay with women, but barred trans women from women’s spaces where they felt safest. Once in gendered housing programs, clients needed to navigate constant gender assessment in interactions. Trans men employed several strategies to establish gendered selves who were easily categorized as either male or female; these strategies allowed them to access stable housing. Gender sanctioning posed a major problem for Black trans women. Black trans women were highly scrutinized in women’s programs, characterized as illegitimate based on biological definitions of gender, and harassed for any perceived deviation from gender norms. When this harassment escalated into conflict, they were expelled from programs based on rules against fighting. Regulation of Black trans women’s womanhood therefore led to their systematic material deprivation. By understanding the connections between categorical exclusions and exclusion from resources we can better understand the reproduction of reentry hardship and inequality more broadly.

Author

• Joss Taylor Greene, Columbia University