The goal of this post is not to detract from the harm that transgender women face in the United States prison system, but instead to focus on the very real erasure of transgender men, I will be talking about the amount of times transgender women are talked about versus the number of times transgender men are. This does not mean we should stop talking about transgender women, it means we need to be talking about transgender men more.
Recently I saw a claim that said transgender men do not face as much discrimination in the prison system as transgender women; unsure of the validity of this claim, I looked up "trans men in us prisons" in duck duck go with all ai features turned off (because I do not trust an LLM to provide accurate information). I limited myself to the first page of results as that is likely what someone who was only slightly interested in the topic and wanted to search up would do, as well as allowing for the top article to swap around between the first 10 results. With executive order 14168 the "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" having gone into affect January 20, 2025, I knew the focus would be on the affects it has on transgender women and their movement to men's prisons, as results would be picked up due to the words 'trans' and 'prison' being in my search, and many article titles using gender neutral language. However, what I did not expect was the very few mentions of trans men in articles that supposedly included us. Within my first search the results showed 8 articles, 1 wikepedia article and 1 reddit post. As reddit is not easily fact checkable or always correct, I am not including it in my findings. All citations, and some footnotes will be posted in a reblog with corresponding numbers.
In the very few mentions of transgender men within these articles many of these mentions were only one sentence long, if that. I very much so wish I could give more One article focuses on the statistics of transgender people within prison, such as homelessness, schooling completed, danger within the prison, etc., and as such does not mention gender identity at all (2). Another article focuses on the executive article and its impact. As such trans men were only mentioned once to say that of nearly 2200 transgender inmates, "22 trans women are currently housed in women's facilities and one trans man is living in a men's facility" (1). In a later article, it was stated that there are just under 1,600 transgender women and just over 700 transgender men within the United States Prison system, this is the only mention of transgender men within the article (3). That is a ratio of 2.286 trans women to transgender men. Two of the articles are interviews with transgender inmates, and in total there are 12 interviews (6 & 4). The remaining mentions in articles are less then a sentence long, about how special commissary items such as binders while previously available are no longer (5), one trans man is unable to access his hormones (4).
However, out of the 12 interviews, between the 2 articles, only 2 are with transgender men; except calling the second one an interview is a complete stretch! Within the article, 'We Spoke to 8 Trans Inmates. They Say the Bureau of Prisons is Illegally Denying Them Care' by Hope Pisoni, there are 9 inmates mentioned, 8 of which were transgender women, 1 was a trans man. 7 of the 8 transgender women had quotes within the article, 4 of the transgender women who had 3 or more quotes, and all of them had at at least a paragraph grouping about them (Note one of them was 3-4 sentences long depending on how you count the sentences). Benjamin Wills, the transgender man they spoke to, had one sentence, mentioning that his hormones were cut off, and then the following sentence was how another transgender woman was also continuing to be denied hormones. An attorney, the mother of one of the inmates, a prison policy, the sister of one of the inmates, a prison warden, and the Office of Public Affairs for the Bureau of Prisons all got a a quote. This is not a short article either. There are 49 paragraphs, as short as two sentences and as long as 5 plus sentences. Why? What was the difference between Benjamin Wills and every other person they interviewed? Why are our voices not heard? Why was his story not told? Why are you erasing us?
Again, the goal of this is not to say that transgender women's stories should not be told or talked about. This is about the Need for transgender men's stories to be told.
