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One of the planks of President Trump’s campaign was bashing trans people. And he wasted no time delivering on his vow to inflict maximum harm on minorities.
Promises (to be cruel) made, promises (to be cruel) kept!
Within hours of taking the oath of office, he issued an executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
The order has been widely mocked for being biologically illiterate. It defines “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell,” despite the fact that sexual differentiation of zygotes doesn’t take place until several weeks post-conception.
But it will still cause major destruction, particularly to trans and non-binary prisoners. Specifically, Trump instructed the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers, including through amendment, as necessary, of Part 115.41 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations and interpretation guidance regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
Title 28 CFR 115 lays out implementation standards for for the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA). Section 115.41 provides that every inmate shall be assessed on intake for “their risk of being sexually abused by other inmates or sexually abusive toward other inmates” including, among several other criteria “Whether the inmate is or is perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or gender nonconforming.” But Trump’s new order insists that there is no such thing as transgender, intersex, or gender nonconforming — they’ve been defined out of existence by executive fiat. And to make darn sure, he’s instructed prisons to deny non-existent trans people medical care, forcibly detransitioning them and ordering trans women to be transferred to men’s prisons.
It should be noted that, while America’s carceral system is plagued with sexual assault and abuse, gender non-conforming inmates are particularly likely to be victimized. And so, under the guise of “defending women,” Trump will now send trans women into settings where they are in grave danger of being sexually assaulted, in direct defiance of the mandates of the PREA.
As reporter Adam Rhodes notes at The Appeal, while the PREA standards are only binding on federal facilities, they provide a financial cudgel to force states to implement their guidelines:
PREA standards are binding for federal agencies but not for state facilities. However, in order to receive federal grants, state carceral institutions must prove they comply with PREA. For those that do not, the federal government reduces their grants by 5 percent. For the 2024 fiscal year, all but six U.S. states and territories met PREA guidelines.
Rhodes also notes that the new guidelines will run into multiple existing court orders and consent decrees, which oblige state and federal facilities to provide medical care consistent with a prisoner’s gender identity. But considering how successfully Trump was able to demonize Harris by accusing her of supporting gender reassignment surgery for prisoners, it’s likely the new president would relish such a fight.
And meanwhile, rates of prison rape are almost certain to go up. But, as ever, the cruelty is the point.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
