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23 Critical Criminology 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/ctlcrm23 and id is 1 raw text is: Crit Crim (2015) 23:1-20 DOI 10.1007/s10612-014-9243-6 Lost in Translation: Looking for Transgender Identity in Women's Prisons and Locating Aggressors in Prisoner Culture Jennifer Sumner - Lori Sexton Published online: 22 May 2014 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract The incarceration of transgender prisoners in men's prisons is a burgeoning topic of legal challenge, policy development, and social science inquiry. The conspicuous absence of comparable attention to women's facilities may facilitate a tacit assumption that what is known about transgender prisoners in men's prisons translates seamlessly to women's facilities. This paper interrogates this assumption by examining current under- standings of what it means to be transgender in a women's prison. Findings from focus groups with prisoners and staff reveal that gender is understood as both reflected by and constituted through social interaction. Specifically, in attempting to explain the concept of transgender in women's prisons, this work instead reveals a different prevailing concept in prisoner culture: aggressor. Unlike transgender, aggressor does not denote gender identity; rather, it implies presentation and performance as reflective of gendered ways of navigating relationships within the context of a sex-segregated setting. These findings simultaneously affirm the extant literature on gender and sexuality in women's prisons and complicate the translation of the identity-based concept transgender from men's prisons to a women's prison. Introduction In the past two decades, transgender prisoners-who are primarily housed according to biological sex rather than gender identity-have increasingly been a focus of policy J. Sumner (E) Department of Criminal Justice, Seattle University, 901 12th Ave., PO Box 222000, Seattle, WA 98122, USA e-mail: sumnerje@seattleu.edu L. Sexton Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Missouri - Kansas City, 5215 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO 64110, USA e-mail: sextonl@umkc.edu Springer

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