New book sheds light on the experiences of transgender and non-binary inmates in UK prisons
A new book Transgender and Non-binary Prisoners’ Experiences in England and Wales co-authored by the University of Leicester’s Dr Olga Suhomlinova and the Open University’s Dr Saoirse Caitlin O’Shea has just been released by Emerald Publishing – and has already been hailed by the reviewers as one of ‘the best books on the prison experience’
The monograph is an outcome of a three-year-long research project during which the authors engaged in correspondence with 19 transgender women and 4 non-binary individuals incarcerated in 19 prisons for men, generating a half-million-word archive of participant responses.
The book combines the first-person accounts of the participants’ lives before and in prison with the historical and policy analyses of treatment of trans and non-binary people in the English prison system and the assessment of material and relational aspects of their confinement, in comparison with cisgender prisoners.
Discussing the book, Dr Suhomlinova, Associate Professor in Management at the University of Leicester School of Business, noted: “For transgender women in prisons for men, one of the main problems is ‘allowability’, accessibility, and affordability of ‘gendered’ items, such as clothing, footwear, toiletries, and makeup, indeed, everything that they need to be able to look and feel feminine.
“Another issue is the excruciatingly slow and difficult access to gender-affirming care, owing to both the internal (prison healthcare) and external (Gender Identity Clinics) barriers. This causes ‘forced detransition’ for those who started medical transition before incarceration and pushes others towards self-harm and DIY surgeries.
“Last, but not least, is the matter of physical, sexual, and emotional victimisation of transgender women by other prisoners.
“For non-binary prisoners, the key challenge is that they are not recognised, even if they officially ‘come out’ to prison authorities as non-binary, and are not afforded the ‘privileges’ (such as access to gender-affirming care or feminine items) officially allotted to trans prisoners.”
Dr Suhomlinova and Dr O’Shea have called on HM Prison and Probation Service to clarify and expand the list of ‘gendered’ items to which prisoners have access. They have also called on the NHS to provide training to prison GPs so that they can prescribe and monitor gender-affirming hormone therapy treatment.
Transgender and Non-binary Prisoners’ Experiences in England and Wales is available for purchase from Emerald Books and on Amazon
A book launch will take place at University of Leicester School of Business on Wednesday, 8 January. More information can be found here.