Washington State Prison Takes Unprecedented Action

Hokyoung Kim for HuffPost Washington state’s prison officials forcibly removed a transgender woman from the women’s prison where she had lived for three and a half years and transferred her to a men’s facility last week, marking the first time the agency has removed a transgender person from gender-affirming housing. Despite DOC’s rules against physical intimacy, consensual sex in prison is “absolutely commonplace,” said Starr Lake, who was incarcerated at WCCW for more than 20 years and briefly overlapped with Kim. I can’t imagine.” Much of the intimacy in prison goes undetected by prison staff, but there have been 33 so-called “504 infractions” at WCCW since January 2021, around the time Kim arrived. “We can plainly see that while DOC is actively parading around its progressive stance towards trans people, what we can see in practice is that it’s extremely tenuous,” said A.D. Lewis, an attorney who used to work with trans people incarcerated in Washington state and now runs the Prison Law Office’s Trans Beyond Bars project. DOC’s “own policies have come to recognize that trans people exist in prisons and have faced significant danger — and their own decision to transfer Amber to a women’s prison indicates their recognition that she is, in fact, a trans woman who faces danger in men’s prisons,” said Dean Spade, a professor at Seattle University School of Law.