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“Safe” Prisons? Challenging Violence Narratives and Anti-Gender Feminist Agendas
Introduction
“Safe” Prisons? Challenging Violence Narratives and Anti-Gender Feminist Agendas critiques the use of safety narratives by anti-gender feminists to justify exclusionary and harmful policies targeting trans and gender-diverse people. These campaigns - among other strategies - take their aim at public institutions and community spaces with “single sex” policies. This article explores the example of how prisons have come to be the subject of such “single sex” campaigns. Drawing on global evidence, the essay shows that trans women are more often the victims than perpetrators of prison violence, and furthermore that prisons and other carceral settings are inherently violent systems. It calls for feminist movements to reject punitive, biological essentialist frameworks and instead build inclusive, rights-based strategies to challenge systemic violence and advance collective safety.
Summary
“Safe” Prisons? Challenging Violence Narratives and Anti-Gender Feminist Agendas is a call to question harmful narratives driven by anti-gender feminists, especially those that misleadingly use narratives about “women’s safety” to compromise the safety of trans and gender-diverse people in society - with the particular example of closed settings such as prisons. The essay shines a light on how prison safety debates are used to promote anti-trans rhetoric. This rhetoric relies on outdated and debunked biological essentialism - the notion that innate, immutable biological factors determine who we are and how we are treated in society - positioning trans women as threats to cis-gender women.
The essay reflects on how public figures and mainstream media promote these narratives, giving them widespread public appeal. For example, disinformation campaigns targeting Algerian boxer Imane Khelif during the 2024 Olympics were used as a way to spark discussion and spread dangerous anti-trans myths. Influential voices like JK Rowling, who has a history of being transphobic, perpetuated myths about trans women essentially being predatory men. These narratives are not only factually groundless they also fuel moral panic, resulting in discrimination and violence against trans people.
Similar anti-trans campaigns use prisons as their subject, claiming that housing transwomen in women’s prisons put other women prisoners in danger. The essay analyses how anti-gender feminist campaigns such as “Keep Prisons Single Sex” (UK) promote essentialist sex binary segregation policies in prisons under the guise of protecting cis-gendered women from violence.
These campaigns hide the reality that trans women - whether detained in in men’s or women’s prisons - consistently report experiencing disproportionate levels of violence which include sexual assault and physical abuse, in comparison to other prisoners. The essay spotlights studies from the United States, Latin America and Thailand which illustrate this pattern.
These campaigns claim to promote “single sex” policies in prisons to protect women - but are in reality a vehicle for harmful anti-trans disinformation. Not only that - they obfuscate the fact that prisons are inherently violent contexts. As a result of that, these campaigns directly and indirectly advance the expansion and entrenchment of prison systems in our societies.
Prisons are built and maintained on logics of violence and power inequality - numerous studies from around the world show that prisons are often overcrowded, underfunded and designed to deprive incarcerated persons of their sense of freedom and autonomy, thereby resulting in neglect, abuse and torture. This violence often goes undocumented with little accountability. Reports on prisons from numerous countries illustrate that violence in prisons is the norm, not the exception.
Campaigns which promote anti-trans rhetoric simply distract us from paying attention to the real drivers of violence in prison systems which are rooted in power inequality, racial and gender inequality, and the criminalisation of poverty. It calls for a shift in perspective and reframing of the concept of safety by questioning the role of prisons in our societies. The essay encourages intersectional feminist approaches to understanding, addressing and ending violence in an inclusive and expansive way. The essay encourages feminists to reject alliances with oppressive actors and systems and instead to work towards true justice by tapping into the power of cross-movement solidarity, and to challenge binaries and dismantle punitive structures together.
Download the full article (English) here!