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Grayson Treece is a senior at the University of Maine at Farmington, studying political science, legal studies and English.
Gender-affirming care has been a hot-button issue in the U.S. for years now. Despite more than a hundred bills across the country challenging it in this past year alone, research shows that gender-affirming care is successful and saves countless lives by lowering rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation in transgender individuals. Furthermore, gender-affirming care for trans youth (which have been a specific target of four-fifths of the 100-plus bills in the past year) has also been proven time and time again to be safe, successful and lifesaving.
Unfortunately, though, this abundance of evidence has not stopped lawmakers from targeting gender-affirming care and labeling it as harmful. As a result, those who already have some of the worst access to health care in our country — our incarcerated population — have little to no access to this essential care.
In many prisons across the country, transgender inmates’ ability to gain access to crucial gender-affirming care is almost impossible. Incarcerated trans individuals must meet a certain “threshold” in order to be eligible for any gender-affirming care like hormone replacement therapy, gender-affirming garments like binders or bras, sexual reassignment surgery, and even being in prison facilities that relate to their gender identity. This threshold, the classification of “serious condition,” has led incarcerated individuals to resort to heartbreaking means such as self-surgery.
Here in Maine, Maine Department of Corrections Policy 23.8 lays out our state’s rules and regulations for “management of transgender and intersex prisoners.” The policy breaks down the general guidelines, then goes into more specific guidelines for those who identified as transgender at intake versus those who didn’t. As is to be expected, the guidelines for those who did not identify as trans at intake are very different. Unfortunately, though, many people in our state and country are incarcerated at very young ages, are too impoverished to afford therapy to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria or get hormones and surgery, or may not even know what being transgender is at the time they become incarcerated.
It can’t be said that Maine doesn’t deserve some praise, though. In Portland, administrators at the county jail worked with the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups in Maine to establish the Transgender Review Committee that, among other things, allows inmates to dress and use names and pronouns in accordance with their gender identity, explicitly prohibits any verbal or physical harassment of trans inmates, and allows inmates to choose their preference of guard in terms of gender when being searched.
The prison system is far from (and most likely will never be) perfect. However, Maine stands out as an example of a state that is taking some steps to ensure the health and safety of incarcerated individuals.
This may be leaving you wondering why you haven’t heard much about any of the positive policies we have for incarcerated transgender people here in Maine. I wondered this, too, when I began my research on our policies. Many of the media articles that appear when you Google “trans people” and “Maine prisons” together use harmful language and are focused on individual transgender inmates and unique cases rather than anything about the everyday experience of incarcerated trans people in Maine. By choosing to only focus on these unique cases and rile up communities with stories of murderous trans women being transferred to women’s prisons (with many other murderous women), these stories are fanning the flames of the harmful rhetoric that is causing gender-affirming care to be banned across our country.
One in five of all Americans have experienced mental illness, and in prisons, that number jumps exponentially to an average of more than 50 percent. It’s critical that we, as a state and as a country, remember all of the studies, reports and data that prove gender-affirming care can help prevent mental health issues like anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. We must remember and acknowledge that gender affirming care saves lives.
