From Policy To Prisoners To People - A "Soft Mixed Methods" Approach To Studying Transgender Prisoners

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
From Policy to Prisoners 39(5) 517–553

© The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0891241610375823
Methods” Approach to http://jce.sagepub.com
Studying Transgender
Prisoners
Valerie Jenness1
Abstract
This article describes the official protocol and unexpected contingencies
that motored data collection for a large scale study of transgender inmates
in California prisons for men. The focus is on gender and sexuality as
methodological confounds that, surprisingly and productively, ultimately
served to shed insight into basic sociological questions as well address
the policy questions that originally motivated the research. Drawing on
serendipitously collected ethnographic data from a plethora of exchanges
with experts, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
(CDCR) officials, researchers, and transgender inmates, this article reveals
the categorization commitments and processes that permeate the lives
of “the girls among men” in prisons for men. In light of these findings,
the author argues for the value of adopting what she calls a “soft mixed
methods” approach when doing non-ethnographic work designed to inform
policy. To do so stimulates sociological imagination and ultimately provides
more nuanced, layered, and complicated answers to policy questions while
also providing insights into more basic research questions.
1
University of California, Irvine, CA, United States
Corresponding Author:
Valerie Jenness, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, Department of Sociology,
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-7080, USA
Email: jenness@uci.edu
Downloaded from jce.sagepub.com at University of British Columbia Library on June 21, 2015
518 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39(5)
Keywords
mixed methods, transgender, prisons, prisoners, gender and sexuality, sexual
assault
Toward the end of our conversation, she [an African American trans-
gender inmate in a prison for men] asked me: “Why are you interested
in all this stuff? You seem like a woman without problems. Why do
you care? Do you find us odd? Do you think we’re freaks?” She was
not bothered by the thoughts underlying her questions, just more inter-
ested in learning my motivations. I think she liked that someone with
“no problems” was interested in her life and seemingly didn’t want
anything from her in a context where everyone wants something from
you. But I did want something from her: data, stories, illumination,
evidence, and, ultimately, understanding.
Fieldnotes taken in a California prison for men,

by Valerie Jenness in 2008
In the summer of 2007, Alexis Giraldo, a transgender parolee who served

over two years in California prisons, sued the California Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and individual prison staff members
who allegedly allowed her to be serially raped by her male cellmates while in
Folsom State Prison.1 After successfully navigating a complex and exhaust-
ing extra-legal and legal complaint process, Giraldo, a young Puerto Rican
transgender woman—a biological male who identifies and presents as
female—had her day in court.2 During the two week trial in San Francisco
Superior Court, the plaintiff and her attorney communicated to the jury, the
witnesses in the courtroom, and the press how she was placed in a men’s
prison without regard for the obvious risk of sexual assault from the male
prisoners she was housed with; endured daily beatings and brutal sexual
assaults by her cellmate; begged for help from prison staff and was told to “be
tough and strong”; reported the injuries to doctors and therapists; and offi-
cially documented her situation and experiences.
In turn, the State’s attorneys representing the CDCR contested these
claims. They argued that Giraldo’s allegations were unsubstantiated and dis-
credited him as a disgruntled parolee with a history of manipulative and
deceitful behavior. They explained that inmates with male genitalia are, of
course, housed in men’s prisons; and they emphasized the plaintiff’s request
to be placed in the housing assignment where the alleged sexual assaults
occurred and subsequent refusal to transfer to alternative housing when given
Jenness 519
multiple opportunities to do so. They pointed to the consensual nature of his

sexual liaisons with other inmates, including the alleged rapist, and to his
failure to clearly and unequivocally inform CDCR staff of sexual assaults at
the time they occurred. They claimed he had financial motivations for filing
suit. They argued that he is a convicted felon who, by virtue of his previous
convictions, has demonstrated he is capable of—and well rehearsed at—
engaging in fraudulent endeavors in the obvious pursuit of self-interest.3
Both sides in this high profile legal dispute emphasized that the plaintiff is
a gendered subject, but they differed—in fact, they were diametrically
opposed—in their assessment of the plaintiff’s gender and attendant standing
as a legal subject: the plaintiff’s attorney maintained that Giraldo is, for all
intents and purposes, a female and should be understood as such, while the
State’s attorney maintained that Giraldo is, for all intents and purposes, a
male and should be understood as such.4 The jury charged with wading
through these claims and counterclaims considered the evidence, including a
report on which I was the lead author (Jenness et al. 2007; see also Jenness
2008; Jenness, Maxson, et al. 2010). They assessed the credibility of the par-
ties participating in the trial and rendered a verdict. Without explicitly taking
sides in the gender dispute that characterized this case, the jury found in favor
of the CDCR on the alleged civil charges. To quote one legal observer, the
CDCR “dodged a bullet.”5
This case raises a series of policy and scholarly questions related to trans-
gender prisoners in men’s prisons; and it reveals a complicated picture of the
nexus between sex, gender, sexuality, and corrections. On the policy side,
what are the causes, contours, and prevalence of sexual assault for transgen-
der inmates in men’s prisons in California? How do transgender inmates in
prisons for adult men perceive and navigate the risks they face in prison?
What “best practices” can prison officials embrace to ensure they meet their
responsibility to house transgender prisoners in safe, secure, humane, and
constitutional carceral environments? On the more academic side, the Giraldo
case raises a broader set of questions about what it means to be transgender
in prison and what that, in turn, can teach us about gender, inequality, margin-
alization, intergroup and domestic violence, and the workings of prison
culture.
With these questions in mind, in 2008 I conducted in-prison research on
“the girls among men,” to quote how transgender prisoners have often
described themselves to me, in California’s prisons for adult men (Jenness
2010; Jenness, Sexton, and Sumner 2010; Sumner 2009). The phrase “the
girls among men” and its variant “the ladies among men” are telling in light
of the fact that prisons, which have historically developed along gender lines,
arguably remain the most sex segregated institutions in the U.S. and abroad
and continue to be fundamentally organized around gender. As Britton (2003,
3) explains: “Ideas about gender have shaped prisons, literally and figura-
tively, from their very first appearance as institutions of social control.”
Commensurate with this history, decades of scholarship make it beyond dis-
pute that gender remains a central organizing principle of modern-day pris-
ons; it is taken for granted that there are “men’s prisons” and “women’s
prisons” (Bosworth 1999; Britton 2003; Kruttschnitt and Gartner 2004). To
talk about “transgender” in the context of gender binary-delineated prisons
and in the wake of the Giraldo trial—arguably a key moment in the history of
prisons and the public interrogation of correctional policy (or lack thereof)—
is to raise fundamental questions about the structure and operation of prisons
as well as the lives of transgender prisoners in prisons designed for one sex,
and one sex only. In some ways, the mere existence and increasing visibility
of transgender prisoners arguably serves to (at least potentially) decenter the
sex-segregated structure and culture of prisons. As will be revealed in this
article, it also serves to complicate data collection protocols and decenter in-
prison data collection efforts.
In this article, I present my study of transgender inmates in California
prisons for men as what I am calling “a soft mixed methods approach” to
policy research that ultimately served to address basic research questions as
well. By qualifying the term “mixed methods” with the term “soft,” I do not
meant to reify the image of quantitative research as “hard” and qualitative
research as “soft” (and I certainly do not mean to do so in the context of talk-
ing about transgender lives!). Rather, I mean to hedge on any assertion that
the work described in this article fully integrates qualitative and quantitative
research (Bryman 2007; Tashakkori 2009) or that I am putting forth a distinc-
tive methodology (Greene 2008). Instead, in this article I describe both the
official protocol and the unexpected contingencies that motored data collec-
tion, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality as methodological con-
founds that, surprisingly and productively, ultimately served to shed insight
into basic sociological questions about the social organization of sex, sexual-
ity, and gender in the context of prisons. To quote one of my colleagues who
commented on this work when I was in the midst of data collection, “that
gender thing keeps getting in the way and messing everything up.” To be
sure, “that gender thing” made data collection in general and life in the field
complicated in unanticipated ways; however, from a research point of view,
it also made challenges related to research design more interesting and ulti-
mately a source of substantive findings.
Jenness 521
The study described in this article and elsewhere (Jenness 2010; Jenness,
Sexton, et al. 2010; Sexton, Jenness, and Sumner 2010; Sumner 2009) was
not designed as an ethnography and it does not, strictly speaking, qualify as
an ethnography; however, it necessarily included an ethnographic component
as a result of being in many prisons, among many prisoners, and engaged
with many CDCR personnel. As the research unfolded across twenty-eight
prisons in California, qualitative data purposely collected in face-to-face
interviews with over three hundred transgender prisoners and ethnographic
data serendipitously collected in the field site emerged as valuable sources of
information, especially in terms of revealing the contours of gender and sexu-
ality in prisons for men. As described in this article, the qualitative interview
data and the ethnographic information shed considerable insight into the
basic policy question—where best to house transgender inmates if keeping
them safe is the primary goal.6
In an article aptly titled “On the Rhetoric and Politics of Ethnographic
Methodology,” Jack Katz (2004, 280) persuasively argues that “all ethnogra-
phies are politically cast and policy relevant.” The ethnographic components
of this study are no different, despite the fact that this study begins with pol-
icy motivations and was primarily organized with quantitative data collection
in mind. The ethnographic data for this study were not systematically col-
lected but nonetheless proved invaluable to the larger pursuit precisely
because they effectively revealed the messy nature of the social realm under
investigation. Unanticipated ethnographic data became identifiable as a
source of substantive insight just as Hoffman (2007) persuasively argued that
the emotional labor involved in interviewing constitutes data worth analyz-
ing. What I call a “soft mixed methods” approach, as described in this article,
stimulates sociological imagination and can ultimately provide more nuanced,
layered, and complicated answers to policy questions while also providing
insights into basic research questions.
The remainder of this article reveals how data collected in accordance
with the officially approved research protocol coupled with unexpected eth-
nographic engagement ultimately revealed a complex social terrain marked
by both hegemonic and contested assumptions about the social organization
of gender and sexuality. I focus on how experts, CDCR officials, and research-
ers (including the author of this article!) and transgender prisoners who par-
ticipated in my study constructed gender and sexuality as applied to
transgender inmates. By describing a series of observations and interactions
that set the stage for, sustained, and responded to data collection efforts, I
treat what Goffman (1963) would call instances of a “primal sociological
scene” as a source of empirical findings. In the next section, I describe how
the stage was set for the research, emphasizing the way in which the larger
context shaped the official study design and the official protocol for the
research. Thereafter, I focus on the key methodological challenge I con-
fronted in this work—how to identify, access, and understand transgender
inmates in California prisons—as the basis for a plethora of exchanges with
experts, CDCR officials, researchers, and transgender inmates that ultimately
provided invaluable insight into substantive questions that inspired this work.
I conclude with a brief discussion of the value of adopting what I call a “soft
mixed methods” approach when doing policy research that is not primarily
ethnographic but nonetheless stands to benefit immensely when ethnographic
data can be collected and integrated into the design, analysis, and interpreta-
tion of findings. In a related vein, I argue that we gain a great deal by embrac-
ing the messiness of research in order to capture the complexity of the social
world, even if transgender inmates routinely report wanting to avoid “messy”
situations (more on that later).
Setting the Stage: Making the Case for Policy

Research and “Getting in” Prisons in the
Golden State
A plethora of work has critically examined the many challenges that

researchers face as they struggle to gain access to spheres of social life that
are routinely off limits and render invisible marginal populations (Feldman,
Bell, and Berger 2003). This is especially problematic when it comes to
studying criminal justice–related issues in general (Castellano 2007) and
conducting research in prisons in particular (Arriola 2006; Waldram 2009;
Zwerman and Gardner 1986). In the case of this research, meeting these
objectives is even more challenging by virtue of treating the largest correc-
tional system in the western world—often referred to as a dysfunctional
organization7—as a field site; when the topic to be studied inside prisons is
sexual assault; and when the population to be studied is transgender inmates
in men’s prisons—a group with special vulnerabilities and, in some cases,
considerable motivation to remain “unknown.”
Capitalizing on an Historic Moment and the Need

for Policy Research
My study of transgender prisoners in California prisons for men was com-
missioned by the CDCR shortly after they were presented with my previous
Jenness 523
in-prison research on sexual assault, which revealed that transgender inmates

are considerably more likely to be sexually assaulted in prison than their
non-transgender counterparts (Jenness 2008; Jenness et al. 2007; Jenness,
Maxson, et al. 2010). This central finding, coupled with the increasing visi-
bility of transgender inmates in prisons and the high profile Giraldo case,
raised questions about the well-being of transgender prisoners while in the
care of state officials. Questions about the well-being of transgender prison-
ers in the care of the CDCR were, for a variety of reasons, defined as “press-
ing” by an array of stakeholders both within and outside of the CDCR (for
more along these lines, see Jenness and Smyth 2007).
In this context, the CDCR funded my study of transgender prisoners in
their prisons in order to help them address a very specific set of policy ques-
tions with which they were grappling: Where is it best to house transgender
inmates—in general populations, segregated populations, or sensitive needs
populations, for example—in order to minimize sexual assault and other
forms of victimization? Related, are transgender inmates in prisons for men
safer from sexual assault in housing units with other transgender inmates or
in housing units among non-transgender inmates? With these interrelated
policy questions in mind, my study, the first systematic empirical study of
transgender inmates, was first and foremost designed to collect quantifiable
self-report data from transgender prisoners, official demographic data on
transgender prisoners, and official data on the housing environments in which
transgender prisoners reside in state prisons for men to discern where best to
house them and who best to house them with. This is the “policy” part of the
main title of this article.
Getting in the Golden State’s Prisons in the Age

of Mass Incarceration
With a policy concern front and center and the full support of the CDCR, I
was fortunate to gain access to California prisons and the transgender prisons
housed therein;8 securing access to prisoners and approval to do in-prison
research is currently at odds with larger trends in in-prison research. Despite
the unprecedented growth of the correctional population in the U.S., espe-
cially the massive increases in incarceration rates since the early 1970s, there
has been a discernable decline in scholarly attention to life inside prison
walls (Simon 2000; Wacquant 2002). This is especially the case with in-
prison observational research (Waldrom 2009). As Wacquant (2002, 385)
argued:
Observational studies depicting the everyday world of inmates all but

vanished just as the United States was settling into mass incarceration
and other advanced countries were gingerly clearing their own road
towards the penal state. The ethnography of the prison thus went into
eclipse at the very moment when it was most urgently needed on both
scientific and political grounds. [Emphasis in the original]
Compared to the era in which Donald Clemmer (1940) and Gresham Sykes
(1958) did their ethnographic work, what Simon (2000) has identified as the
“golden age of U.S. prison sociology,” the current era of prison research in
the U.S. has produced a paucity of “in prison” research in the U.S. (for excep-
tions, see Fleisher and Krienert, 2006; Irwin, 2005; Jenness, Maxson, et al.
2010; Rhodes 2004; Sexton, Jenness, and Sumner 2010).
In light of this state of affairs, in “The Curious Eclipse of Prison
Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Wacquant (2002, 386-87)
argued that researchers need to get “inside and around penal facilities to carry
out intensive, close-up observation of the myriad relations they contain and
support.” With this in mind, the good news is that I got “inside” California
prisons. The bad news is that I did not get in to do a “close up observational
study” of the type Wacquant would appreciate. Rather, I embraced the oppor-
tunity to collect official data and self-report data on currently incarcerated
transgender prisoners as an opportunity to also collect qualitative, ethno-
graphic data on transgender inmates. In other words, the former can be seen
as a catalyst for the latter.
But what, exactly, had I gotten into? Joan Petersilia (2008a, 6), arguably
the leading expert on California corrections, recently succinctly described
California corrections:
As Edward Abbey (1975) wrote, “There is science, logic, reason; there

is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”
Mr. Abbey was writing about efforts to protect the California wilder-
ness, but I believe his quote also describes the corrections system.
There is no correctional system in the United States of America like
California’s—whether described by size, judicial intervention, the
power of organized labor, or its high recidivism rate. This context is
critical to our understanding of the potential for criminological
research to influence decision-making.
The State of California currently has the largest corrections agency in the
nation (Petersilia 2008b). When field data collection began, there were
Jenness 525
approximately 160,000 adult prisoners incarcerated in thirty-three prisons in

California spanning 745 miles from the southern-most prison to the northern-
most prison.9 Despite the rising rate at which females are being incarcerated
in California, well over 90 percent of California inmates are housed in thirty
prisons for men, including nine reception centers for adult men. This was my
sprawling research site.
Not surprisingly, there is a wealth of statistical data on the California
prison population. However, when I began this study, there were no data
available on transgender inmates in California prisons. From the point of
view of those charged with managing prisons, transgender inmates are a vis-
ible population because they are often thought of as the source of in-prison
disorder and attendant management problems; likewise, from the point of
view of those who contest the management of prisons, transgender prisoners
are a visible population because others target them for victimization and
rights violations. However, from the point of view of systematic, empirical
social science data, they are—or more accurately, were—what Tewksbury
and Potter (2005) dubbed “a forgotten group” of prisoners.
Identifying, Accessing, and Understanding

Transgender Prisoners
Plans for data collection for this project began with a consequential fact:
transgender prisoners are an undecipherable population in the CDCR’s offi-
cial databases. Because the CDCR does not officially track inmates by gen-
der status in its sex-segregated prison system in the way that it keeps track
of sex, race/ethnicity, age, height and weight, and so on, prison officials
could not attest to how many transgender inmates were in the system and
where they were located within California’s sprawling prison system.
Likewise, prior to the first article that derives from this work (Sexton,
Jenness, and Sumner 2010), no one could provide a demographic profile of
transgender inmates in California prisons for men and how they compare to
their non-transgender counterparts on standard indicators such as race/eth-
nicity, prison term start date, mental health status, verified gang membership,
classification score, custody level, current sentence length, time remaining
on sentence, commitment offense, sex offender registration, age of first
arrest in California, and so on.
What I did know at the outset of the study is that, true to the sex-
segregated nature of California prisons, transgender inmates born as biologi-
cally male were housed in men’s prisons and transgender inmates born as
biologically female were housed in women’s prisons.10 A taken-for-granted
gender binary resulted in routine automatic placement along these lines—so

routine, in fact, that it made news when, shortly after data collection, officials
transferred a prisoner who was born male but identifiable as transgender to a
women’s prison in California (Collins 2008). Also before data collection
began, I was told that the CDCR has historically concentrated transgender
inmates in three prisons for adult men. This proved to be true, even as I dis-
covered over the course of the research that another prison also housed a
disproportionate number of transgender inmates.11 The result is a prison sys-
tem that simultaneously segregates and concentrates some transgender
inmates and, at the same time, desegregates and isolates other transgender
inmates in prisons for men.
Within this general organizational structure, I faced no small task: search-
ing for an unknown number of needles in lots of haystacks. That is, I was
looking for an unknown number of transgender inmates within hundreds of
housing units in thirty-three prisons spread across the largest state in the U.S.
Based on numbers derived from my previous research in seven prisons
(Jenness 2008; Jenness et al. 2007; Jenness, Maxson, et al. 2010), I estimated
that there were probably about 250 transgender prisoners in California pris-
ons; however, this estimate was not much better than a random guess even as
I used it for purposes of budgeting time and resources on the project. Even
more, earlier on in the project I had to consider whether these needles even
wanted to be found and if so, would they want to participate in research, and
if so, how would I protect their confidentiality when exposed as “found”?
The prominence of these questions revealed what I thought to be “method-
ological vulnerabilities” as well as how little I knew about “the target
population.”
It is within this context that identifying all transgender inmates in prisons
for men in California presented a considerable challenge. Rather than sample
transgender inmates from a single prison or a subgroup of prisons, the study
design included attempting to contact every transgender prisoner in a
California prison at the time of the data collection. Therefore, I worked col-
laboratively with CDCR officials to identify and make face-to-face contact
with all transgender inmates in California prisons for men, including recep-
tion centers and excluding camps.12 My goal was to arrive at a credible esti-
mate of how many transgender inmates are housed in California prisons for
men and invite each and every one of them to participate in the study. In other
words, from the beginning, a central objective of this project was to collect
valid and reliable quantifiable data on the entire population rather than a sam-
ple with potentially limited generalizability. In the beginning, my most
immediate research goals did not require collecting ethnographic data.
Jenness 527
Quite unexpectedly, however, the process whereby I attempted to identify,

access, and interview all transgender inmates in California prisons resulted in
a series of ethnographic moments with experts, my fellow researchers, and
prisoners that simultaneously muddied the methodological waters and gener-
ated empirical findings that ultimately proved as informative as the data col-
lected according to protocol. As I describe in the following, determining who
is and is not transgender and, related, how transgender is understood in the
context of prison life, is tricky business. In large part, this is because gender
and sexuality are tricky business replete with ambiguities and contradic-
tions—the very things that can derail a research project anchored in categori-
cal understandings of the social world built around the establishment and
reification of social boundaries that define categories of people. This is espe-
cially complicated when so-called “gender normals” interact with transgen-
der people (Schilt and Westbrook 2009).
Consulting with Experts to Define and Operationalize

“Transgender Inmate”
Before data collection commenced, I secured advice from consultants about
how best to identify, label, and address transgender prisoners in a respectful
and, from the point of view of data collection, fruitful manner. The consul-
tants on this project included a person with a master’s degree in the social
sciences who identifies as female but for many years was recognizable as
male and lived as a man, a transgender advocate for transgender inmates, an
academic who has studied sexual politics and non-normative sexual identi-
ties for decades, and a few of my colleagues at the University of California,
Irvine. In retrospect, it is not surprising that my concerted effort to arrive at
the “one right way” to signify the target population—to the research team, to
the CDCR, and to the “human subjects”—failed to produce consensus
among the consultants.
However, it did produce insightful commentary. For example, a consultant
I hired because of her background in the social sciences and because I thought
she is transgender (she was born physically recognizable as a male and under-
went surgery as an adult to become physically recognizable as a female) sug-
gested that the research team use language like “others like you,” “women
like you,” or “those presenting as female” when addressing the target popula-
tion. She encouraged me to avoid using the term “transgender” with trans-
gender inmates. Odd, I thought. Later, I discovered she offered this advice at
least in part because she does not identify as transgender; despite the fact that
I hired her precisely because I assumed she is transgender only to find out she
identifies, simply, as “a woman” (who underwent “anatomical corrections” to

reflect that identity).
In contrast, other experts encouraged me to use the term transgender
because it is, they argued, well equipped to capture a range of identities. As
one well-known transgender activist in the Bay Area who has considerable
experience working with transgender prisoners said to me: “Just use trans-
gender, they’ll get it.” When I explained that I wanted to be sensitive about
language and labels and questioned the degree to which the “target popula-
tion” would feel comfortable with the term transgender above and beyond
just getting it, he said:
Val, the cutting edge term is gender variant, but I wouldn’t use this
term. It’s too academic. These folks in prison do not have the room,
space and luxury to think about distinctions between those who wish
to be seen as transgender, those who wish to be seen as women, and
those who just wish to be seen. They don’t care about identity politics
like you think.
He went further to admonish me for wasting valuable research time trying to

parse all this out and said something mildly snide about “us more educated
folks” who sit around and make sense of it all while often forgetting “their”
realities. As I would learn, “their realities” include securing the standing of
“girl” in an alpha male environment (Jenness 2010). From his point of view,
my concern with getting language “right” was misguided—what he called “a
waste of time and energy”—and in some ways beside the point for a group of
people who want to be seen and heard but others often ignore. As I later
learned, he was right. The girls in men’s prisons would be happy to talk with
me and other interviewers on the research team under conditions of confiden-
tiality. Indeed, 95 percent of the transgender inmates with whom we made
contact consented to be interviewed and completed a usable interview
(Jenness, Sexton, et al. 2010; Sexton, Jenness, and Sumner 2010; Sumner 2009).
Taking competing expert advice as well as my own positivistic training
seriously, I was convinced that collecting reliable and valid (categorical) data
required developing criteria by which transgender inmates could be dis-
cerned. Given that there is very little consensus on how best to define the
term transgender and that “transgender” is often used as an umbrella term for
a plethora of identities and practices (Jenness and Geis 2010), I decided to
focus data collection on those inmates who: (1) self-identify as transgender
(or something analogous); (2) present as female, transgender, or feminine in
prison or outside of prison; (3) have received any kind of medical treatment
Jenness 529
(physical or mental) for something related to how they present themselves or

think about themselves in terms of gender, including taking hormones to ini-
tiate and sustain the development of secondary sex characteristics to enhance
femininity; or (4) participate in groups for transgender inmates.13 Meeting
any one of these criteria would qualify an inmate for inclusion in this study.
By deploying these criteria, I hoped to bypass larger debates about who is and
is not transgender and, instead, rely on a comprehensive understanding that
would maximize inclusion without diluting the target population beyond rec-
ognition. In short, my intention was to move from questions of policy to
comprehension of prisoners.
Also prior to commencing data collection, I was convinced that collecting
reliable and valid data required ensuring that those participating in the study
as human subjects needed to be oriented to what we—the researchers—mean
by “transgender” at the beginning of every interview. Failing to do so, I
thought, would surely lead to problematic data. Thus, at the beginning of
interviews with transgender inmates, interviewers said the following:
“Knowing that different people use different terms for things, I want to clar-
ify that, during this interview, when I talk about transgender inmates, I am
referring to those inmates who identify or present as female in men’s pris-
ons.” This, then, was the (presumably) agreed upon understanding of “trans-
gender” used during the interviews. With definitions and operationalizations
in hand, I confidently set about working with the CDCR to find the target
population. This is the “prisoners” part of the main title of this article.
Working with CDCR Administrators to Identify Transgender

Inmates in CDCR Prisons
For CDCR personnel, evaluating various definitions and attendant under-
standings of “transgender” was decidedly unproblematic. With very rare
exception, they had considerable agreement on labels and how they signify
types of inmates and enjoin multiple features of inmates’ status characteris-
tics. More often than not, however, their native knowledge collided head-on
with the definition and operationalization described previously. Fortunately,
the collision was sociologically telling insofar as it revealed the social orga-
nization of gender and sexuality as contested terrain.
Before data collection commenced, I presented an overview of the research
plans to wardens and other CDCR officials in attendance at a wardens’ meet-
ing in Santa Barbara, California, on February 5, 2008. During and after this
presentation, I solicited the assistance of the wardens to identify all transgen-
der inmates in their respective facilities. After delineating the four-pronged
criteria by which I hoped to identify transgender inmates in California pris-

ons, as described previously, the first warden to ask a question said: “So you
want our homosexuals?” Sincerely delivered, this question came off as rea-
sonable and attentive as he was genuinely trying to ensure he understood who
should and should not be on the list produced at his prison. At this moment,
it became clear to me that, for this group of professionals, who have consider-
ably more experience with the target population than I or anyone on my
research team, “transgender” and “homosexual” are conflated social types in
a perceptual scheme that sees very little distinction between the two.
Recognizing this “misunderstanding,” I politely responded: “Well, some
transgender inmates might be homosexual, but some might not; and, in any
event, we want to select transgender inmates, not homosexual inmates.” I
then went over the four-pronged criteria again, emphasizing that we are
selecting transgender inmates quite apart from whether they are homosexual.
My review of the criteria for including study participants, in turn, evoked a
few blank stares and an ensuing discussion about the difference. It was a
discussion that, I am convinced, did not lead to much shared understanding
despite our—theirs and my—best efforts.
Throughout this project, CDCR officials routinely indicated that transgen-
der prisoners in men’s prison are, in the first and last instance, male homo-
sexuals. Thus, they effectively conflate gender, homosexuality, and
transgender. The substantive variation was in how much I responded to the
conflation at various moments in the field. In other moments, I simply did not
respond to indications of this conflation. For example, on the heels of the
wardens’ meeting a high ranking CDCR administrator sent a letter to the
wardens to formalize the request for assistance and to remind them of the
four-pronged criteria by which transgender inmates were to be identified for
participation in the study. Presented next, some of the text of her letter rightly
directed the wardens to err toward over-inclusiveness when producing ros-
ters, knowing that we could eliminate inmates from participation in the study
once an interviewer asked them a few eligibility-related questions when face-
to-face in a confidential setting at the prison:
To ensure the research team has the most current data and because
there is no systemwide code that identifies inmates as transgender,
please provide a list of all transgender inmates (name, CDCR#, and
housing location in facility as of that date) in your institution. To
ensure consistency across all prisons and to ensure that no inmate who
might qualify as transgender is excluded, please include all inmates
that fit any of the following criteria:
Jenness 531
•• Male inmates who present themselves as female, transgender, or

feminine while in prison.
•• Who participate in any transgender related groups in your facility.
•• Who receive any kind of medical treatment (physical or mental) for
something to related to how they present themselves or think about
themselves in terms of gender.
•• Who self identify as transgender. (Official letter sent to CDCR war-
dens, dated March 11, 2008)
I drafted the letter containing this text and, in the main, the director used my
text verbatim. However, before sending the letter to the wardens on official
CDCR letterhead, the director made a key revision. Namely, she inserted the
word “Male” in the first bullet point, effectively ensuring the gender catego-
rization is unambiguous from an institutional point of view.
Unlike my carefully delivered rejoinder in the discussion of the distinction
between transgender and homosexual in the wardens’ meeting described pre-
viously, this time I simply noted the difference (to myself and my research
team) and thanked the director for her assistance. I did not contest the direc-
tor’s revisions to the letter for a host a reasons, including estimating that
another discussion about why inserting “male” might be problematic and
simply desiring to get on with the next phase of the research. This is not the
only point in this research in which I have accepted the terrain as presented to
me and pragmatically embraced Wacquant’s (2002, 387) call of “getting on
with it” both inside and outside the field rather than waiting for pristine con-
ditions to enact well-considered research protocols. I have long since accepted
that pristine field conditions rarely exist, and they never exist in prisons.
With prison-specific lists of transgender inmates in hand, my research
team and I proceeded to head into the field to collect data by generally fol-
lowing the protocol detailed in Jenness et al. (2010). As we did, there was
considerable sifting and predictable attendant loss of cases as we moved from
the total number of names provided on all the lists (n = 751) to the number of
inmates we actually saw face-to-face at a prison (n = 505) to the number of
inmates who actually met our eligibility requirements to participate in the
study (n = 332) to the number of inmates who consented to an interview (n =
316) and the number of inmates who successfully completed a usable inter-
view (n = 315). The largest loss of potential cases as we went from the names
on the master list to actually seeing the person at the prison is due to a variety
of factors, including inmates paroling, dying, or being transferred to another
prison after we received our list and before we arrived at the prison; inmates
being unwilling to come out of their cell; inmates being unavailable as
a result of an urgent medical or psychiatric appointment; and inmates—

believe it or not—being “lost” in the prison and, thus, unavailable for an
interview.14
The gap between the number of transgender inmates on the original list at
any given prison and the number of inmates who successfully completed an
interview varies immensely across prisons. The distribution along these lines
reflects at least four factors: (1) the CDCR’s practice of concentrating the
bulk of transgender inmates in a handful of prisons, as described previously;
(2) the degree to which our original lists were accurate; (3) the ease with
which we were able to work collaboratively with prison-level CDCR officials
to contact inmates at any given prison, sometimes in trying situations; and (4)
the response rate of inmates we invited to participate in the study.15 Most tell-
ing for my purposes here, many inmates on the list provided by the prison
officials did not qualify for our study because, as they would tell us once
face-to-face in an interview room, “I’m just gay,” “I’m not a girl,” and
“You’re barking up the wrong tree here.”
This kind of misidentification often created an awkward moment as the
interviewer had to explain there was, no doubt, a clerical error, apologize for
making an inappropriate assumption, and assure the person that, of course, no
one thinks of him as anything other than what he is. In some cases, this was
no big deal and in other cases, interviewers had to do more interactional work
to respond to the awkward moment and engage in interactional repair work.
In one instance, for example, I wrote the following in my fieldnotes about a
“non-interview”:
I sat down to interview an inmate, a large, African-American, bald,

muscular man who kept calling me “Miss Val.” He explained to me
that he was not gay, that he is “100% real man. The real deal.” He also
said he is a 49 year old drug dealer from [another state] and was happy
to talk with me, but “You shouldn’t do it here. People see people com-
ing in here and they are going to wonder what is going on and think
I’m telling on people.” He suggested that we do interviews in another
building—a building where inmates can’t see who is going to meet
with us. I asked him if he wanted to leave and he said, “No, I’m here
now.” Because I had to wait for [another interviewer] to finish an inter-
view anyway, I asked “Bruce”16 how things were going and he went on
and on about prison politics as “so much about race. It isn’t like this in
[his home state]. I was down 10 years in [his home state] and I never
saw anything like this—blacks don’t talk to whites, whites don’t talk
to blacks, it’s crazy shit. That’s the problem in California—this race
Jenness 533
shit. It really is unbelievable. Race. Gangs. Shit, it’s all a mess. It isn’t
like that in [home state]. In [home state] you can associate with anyone
you want, I mean, as long as they aren’t a sex offender or something.
Someone needs to study this race thing. I’ve never seen anything like
it!” I asked him about the transgender inmates. He said: “They are
what they are. Some of them are taboo. You don’t mess with them.
Some of them are okay.”
Val: “Who is taboo?”
Bruce: “The ones with AIDS. The ones who sleep around and
spread diseases. Those are the ones you need to stay away from. They
are dirty.” I then asked him how [transgender inmates] were thought of
by other inmates and he said: “Some guys are weak. They can’t hold
their own in here. There’s no women and it gets old using your hand to
get off. Oh, I’m sorry; sorry about my language.”
Val: “No, please, explain it to me in whatever language makes sense
to you and will help me understand.”
Bruce: “Ok, you’re locked up, you have no women, you get tired of
using your hand, so you dump in them. They are like a dumping
ground. You just dump your load in them. But, we know they are men.
You have to act like they are women, but we know they are men.
C’mon, man, they have what men have. Still, you can dump your stuff
in her.”
Val: “Why would she let you do that?”
Bruce: “Hey, I didn’t say I do it! I’m not weak. But, they want what
women want: security, protection, comfort, companionship, someone
to be nice to them and take care of them. But, also, some just want the
sex. Some really like it. Others just do it to get what women want.
They are not all the same. Ask them why they do it.”
Val: “Are they good for anything other than sex?”
Bruce: “Yeah, some guys like to talk with them and use them to, you
know, keep the cell clean, wash their clothes, iron, sew, cook, you
know, all the shit women do. I’ve done that, too. I mean, I don’t want
to do that shit. And, like I said, some of them do it because they like
it—it makes them feel like women. But, others do it just to get what
women want: men, protection, comfort, companionship, someone to
talk to, you know. I guess, really, it’s like on the outside. But, like I
said, we know they are men. We don’t get fooled in that way. But,
we’ve got to talk to her like a woman because that’s what she wants.”
He then went on to explain he has a wife and kids at home and that
he’s always provided for them (via selling drugs), “just like men are
supposed to do.” Throughout our conversation, he routinely apolo-

gized for his language and indicated that he did not mean to be disre-
spectful. At the end, as I was escorting him out of the office and down
the hall, he said “Miss Val, don’t think I’m not a gentleman. I treat
women well. I know women like you don’t get treated the way these
girls in here get treated. I bet you get treated real nice. I know the dif-
ference. My momma raised me to respect women and I do. I hope I
didn’t show you any disrespect, did I?” I said “No, not at all. I’m glad
you helped me understand how things work in here, that’s why I’m
here. You’ve been very helpful.”
This impromptu commentary says a lot about the nexus between prison life
and the structure of gender and sexuality in men’s prisons. As I reported in
another publication, this was upsetting to me on multiple levels (Jenness
2010); however, because this “non-case” was effectively providing substan-
tive data related to key concerns related to the larger project, I remained in
research mode. I simply listened and nodded as he spoke, periodically signal-
ing him to continue rather than thank him for his time and move to the next
potential interviewee.17
Working with CDCR Personnel in the Field

The director’s decision to insert the word “male” into previously gender neu-
tral text anticipated what I observed again and again in the field while work-
ing in prisons. As the research team traveled to twenty-eight prisons to
interview over 300 transgender inmates, I spent hundreds of hours with
prison officials in prisons. This included countless hours meeting with war-
dens and their administrative delegates “on-site,” being escorted in and out of
prisons and housing units within prisons by staff, and simply “hanging out”
with officers and inmates alike as I waited for interviewees to be escorted to
confidential interview rooms. Countless serendipitous ethnographic observa-
tions gathered during this “non-interview” time associated with the research
revealed that CDCR staff routinely referred to transgender inmates in men’s
prisons by using masculine generic pronouns and/or by using their male
names rather than adhering to transgender inmates’ preference to be referred
to with feminine generic pronouns and/or by using their female names.
The practice of ordaining transgender inmates in prisons for men as men
was particularly vivid when I was walking across a prison yard with two
other interviewers and the lieutenant with whom we had been working for
days. A Cuban transgender inmate described by an officer on site as “very
flamboyant” was sauntering across the yard with her CDCR-issued blue shirt
Jenness 535
tied at the waist such that it appeared like a female blouse, rubbing her butt,
and announcing to anyone within earshot that she had just had a hormone
shot. She made it clear the shot was both painful and welcome. As other
inmates made note of her visibility on the yard and directed her way what
could be perceived as playful or rude comments—for example, “Hey, aren’t
you looking fine, I’d like a piece of that . . . ”— the lieutenant amicably and
matter-of-factly told the transgender inmate to stop drawing attention to her-
self. He said: “Okay, Mr. Hernandez, that’s enough.” She smiled and quickly
retorted: “That’s Ms. Hernandez.” The officer called her Mr. again and she
corrected him again. This exchange happened three times, with Ms.
Hernandez and the lieutenant finally just walking off in different directions—
her toward the center of the yard and us inside a programming building. Once
inside, I respectfully asked the lieutenant if that kind of exchange is typical
and he said “Yes, but we try to keep it to a minimum.” I then asked: “Why not
just call her Ms. Hernandez? What does it cost you?” He respectfully
explained that Mr. Hernandez is in a male prison, he’s a male, and policy
requires foregoing the use of aliases. He went on to explain that the use of
aliases constitutes a threat to security. What made this particularly telling to
me was that this lieutenant proved to be one of my favorite officers to work
with in the field because he helped us get our work done in an efficient and
effective manner and because, in the process, he struck me as a CDCR offi-
cial who genuinely respects the transgender inmates and truly cares about
their welfare. In my field notes, I wrote “helpful and nice guy.”
In another memorable moment, I was in the administrative segregation
unit in what is considered to be an old, violence-prone prison, waiting for
officers to bring a potential study participant to be interviewed, when an offi-
cer with whom I was chatting made a distinction between a “real one” and
“not one” as he brought inmates to us. At one point, he went further and made
a reference to “a real winner” and “a real one.” I asked the officer closely
stationed by a bulletin board with photo identification of all inmates in the
unit posted how he knew which inmates were transgender. At first, he seemed
hesitant to tell me, but then he said with confidence: “It’s obvious, just look
at them.” I proceeded to look at the many photographs on the board, one by
one, and in a focused and sustained way. I shook my head in a negative direc-
tion as I moved from photo to photo and declared “I can’t tell who’s who.”
When I asked him to help me figure it out, he gleefully did so by pointing to
specific cards and calling out the ID numbers. He treated this identification
exercise as unproblematic until he came across a particular inmate photo. He
pointed to it, paused, and said “Now, that one, who knows . . . I’m not sure.
Can you tell?” My response—“I can’t”—was greeted with an awkward
silence; thereafter, we went through the cards one by one, and he began to
indicate less confidence in his assessment abilities, saying “sometimes it’s
hard to tell” and “sometimes we’re off.” He seemed embarrassed to confess
to this confusion, concluding with “but they all know who they are.” I didn’t
know what to make of this, but I was thinking “if only it were that easy.”
In another memorable exchange in the field, a lieutenant made of point of
distinguishing between homosexual inmates and transgender inmates. After
completing interviews at the prison at which he works, I secured approval
from the warden to take a few pictures of transgender prisoners who con-
sented to having their pictures taken. When I went back to the prison to take
pictures of transgender inmates, this lieutenant—with whom I had been
working a few weeks earlier when my team was there doing interviews—
enthusiastically showed up with his own camera to assist me with our mis-
sion to secure photographs. As we were walking through the administration
building and toward the yard, each of us with camera in hand, the following
dialogue unfolded:
Lieutenant: How will we know who to take pictures of? Do you think
you can tell?
Val: Yes, let’s just look for the female looking inmates.
Lieutenant: But what if they are just gay?
Val: Let’s just look for [plucked] eyebrows and make-up.
Lieutenant: But that might just be the gay ones.
Val: Okay, let’s look for breasts.
Lieutenant: Really, are you serious?
Val: Yeah, I think that’s our best bet.
Lieutenant: I think you’re right. Let’s go to the yard first.
The value of reporting this exchange lies in its exceptional status. It is, quite
simply, the only time—after hundreds of hours in the field with officers and
administrators—a CDCR official explicitly expressed a distinction between
homosexual and transgender inmates. In every other instance in which the
two descriptors were used by CDCR officials, conflation between the social
types was assumed. When I asked the lieutenant how he arrived at this
nuanced understanding, he looked quizzical and then went on to inform me
that he was a single dad for many years during which time his daughters
taught him quite a bit about gender and how it is different than sexuality. He
went further to ask: “It’s complicated, but distinct, right?” He was sincerely
looking to me—the Professor and the Lead Researcher in the exchange—for
an answer and I gave him one: “Yeah, it’s complicated.” I would like to say
I was purposely being vague, if not evasive, in choosing this response. Alas,
Jenness 537
the truth is, I said all I could think of that best reflected my understanding at
the time. It was what undergraduate students tell me is a “duh” response, and
I suspect that is exactly how he heard it.
Debriefing with Fellow Researchers

Almost without fail, interviewers followed each day of data collection with
some “debriefing,” usually in the car on the way home or back to the hotel.
These debriefing sessions are as revealing as the “after the interview”
moment described by Warren et al. (2003) insofar as they provide a window
into how we—the researchers—related to, and indeed managed, gender in
the field. Predictably, this debriefing was sometimes humorous and some-
times shocking.
For example, I had to laugh when an interviewer reported that a transgen-
der inmate mistook her for being pregnant. When the interviewer informed
the inmate that she was not pregnant, the inmate apologized for her rudeness
by saying, “Oh, I’m such a cunt!” What a thing for a transgender inmate in a
men’s prison to say about herself. I found myself thinking: “Well, that’s an
awful thing to call yourself.” But, I also thought: “What does calling yourself
a cunt mean in a context in which having female body parts, especially breasts
and vaginas, is desperately desired and creatively pursued as a necessity for
the Self (with a capital S)?” It occurred to me that maybe a transgender
inmate calling herself a cunt has meaning I do not understand, and, in any
event, I now like to think of it as a playful, positive, multifaceted comment—
a comment defined more by context than cliché.
Debriefing was predictably disturbing as interviewers shared reported
incidents of sexual assault in prison, difficult lives outside of prison, and the
complicated nature of the relationship among gender identity, sexual orienta-
tion, and self-presentation. Doing so amplified all of our exposure to the
highlights of others’ interviews, and hopefully prompted insight that other-
wise would not have occurred. At the same time, sometimes the debriefing
took the form of “Yeah, well, I did an interview with someone who . . . ” as
the comparisons become the basis for what occasionally struck me as a subtle
form of friendly competition over who did the most interesting, illuminating,
and atypical interview as well as a venue for much-needed catharsis at the
end of long and often emotionally taxing days. One day, the interviewer who
interviewed the “lesbian transgender couple” trumped. Another day, the
interviewer who interviewed the transgender inmate who used to work in
porn movies trumped. Another day, the person who interviewed an extremely
mentally ill transgender inmate trumped. Another day, the two interviewers
who interviewed a transgender couple who were making plans to parole and
move in with a lesbian couple in another state and set up a middle-class
household trumped. The examples are endless, but the point remains: there
was seldom a day of interviewing that did not generate a “case” to add to the
pool of cases discussed in our debriefing sessions that effectively diversified
the population and forced us to think in more complicated terms about trans-
gender inmates. Reality continually defied stereotype.
As data collection unfolded, I could not predict what the new case would
be, but debriefing always generated a provocative case to be shared and a
venue for challenging our individual and collective views of the transgender
population. Although I occasionally cringed when I sensed the debriefing
session could be read as “gossipy” or we could (wrongly, I think) be accused
of treating the transgender inmates like a “zoo exhibit” more than an oral
“case study comparison” (to use the official words of social science), I looked
forward to debriefing at the end of a long day of interviewing. During debrief-
ing sessions, I occasionally thought that someone should study us, with an
eye toward trying to make sense of how we do gender, make attributions
related to our human subjects, and otherwise reveal the social fabric in which
we were—and are—inevitably and inextricably entangled.
Most notably for my purposes here, what was not predictable to me was
when we, members of the interview team, “slipped” and, in the process of
debriefing among ourselves, referenced a transgender inmate in our study by
using a masculine generic pronoun. We all did it more than once. The “slip” usu-
ally took the form of saying something like, “Well, he said . . . ,” “His situation
included . . . ,” “The guy I interviewed . . . ,” “I told him . . . ,” and so on. These
slips occurred despite our commitment to enact the interview training that dic-
tated referring to the transgender inmates as they would like to be referred to
(i.e., as transgender or female) and despite a genuine desire to be respectful of
their self-designations and gendered identities. Sometimes these slips were fol-
lowed by immediate self-correction, such as “uh, I mean her . . . ,” or “I mean
she . . . ,” but sometimes they went unmarked. An e-mail exchange with a gradu-
ate student who worked on the project, including interviewing many transgen-
der inmates, is informative along these lines. After the graduate student referred
to a transgender inmate as “his,” I pointed out the slippage when I wrote:
“‘his’—you little assimilationist, you.” The graduate student wrote back:
Ugh—I know. Sometimes I cringe at myself these days when I can tell
I’m just doing what’s needed to get it done and do it quickly—and
what results is slippage. In these cases via e-mail regarding the lists [of
potential subjects for the study] I’ve actually somehow convinced
Jenness 539
myself it’s not awful because technically we don’t know if “he” is

transgender.
I responded: “Oh, that makes two of us. I cringe daily . . . the worst is when I
slip in an interview after the person has told me how much ‘he’ is a girl.
CRINGE.” I report this exchange because it reveals what I experienced
throughout this project. Namely, we very much wanted to get it “right” from
a research point of view, from a humanist point of view, and from a political
point of view. Without malice, and despite our best efforts, however, we too
sometimes reinscribed a seemingly intractable gender order on “the girls.”
We did so even as we (sometimes self-righteously) adopted a critical stance
toward CDCR officials for doing the same. Related, toward the end of data
collection, my neighbor said in passing: “You still studying the guys in the
big house?” I righteously corrected him: “The ladies in the men’s prison.” He
responded “Yeah, right, whatever.” And I said: “The ‘whatever’ matters.”
Engaging with the Transgender Prisoners

Finally, engagement with transgender prisoners in the field serves as a cata-
lyst for revealing both hegemonic assumptions about gender and the decen-
tering of gender and sexuality. Consider, for example, three exchanges in the
field: one that created a moment in which I was orienting to the interviewee
as a male, one that created a moment in which I was orienting to the inter-
viewee as a female, and one that created a moment in which I was being
tutored into a prison-specific gender and sexuality order. Combined, these
cases suggest that my ability to “flaunt it” when “I got it”—a turn of phrase
Mazzei and O’Brien (2009) use to reference the ability of field researchers
to capitalize on “deploying gender” to build rapport and gain analytic advan-
tage—was, at best, problematic (see also Schilt and Westerbrook 2009 on
how so-called “gender normals” interact with transgender people).
The first example came in the middle of an easygoing interview with a
tall, slender, African American transgender inmate with a gentle demeanor
and inviting smile. The transgender inmate surprised me by asking, seem-
ingly out of the blue, “Do you like animals?” Caught off guard, I said “sure”
and then I immediately went back to my line of scheduled questioning. With
what I perceived to be a coy smile, she then said: “Do you want to see my
snake?” I thought “snake” was a reference to a part of the male anatomy and
immediately thereafter thought, “Okay, here we go.” I said “No, that’s okay”
and she responded with “But I really want to show it to you” as she proceeded
to pull out of her shirt pocket a snake—an elongated reptile of the suborder
Serpentes. I laughed, and she asked, “What’s so funny?” I said, “Nothing”

and then proceeded to admire what appeared to be a small garden snake. As I
was petting the snake, she explained that she found the snake on the yard, has
been taking care of it in her cell, and now feels very responsible for the snake.
I suggested that the snake might be happier back out in the yard and perhaps
in the fields beyond the walls. She said she had never thought about that, but
that now the snake might not survive on its own because it has gotten accus-
tomed to being taken care of. She seemed chagrined when she said: “I can’t
set her free now, she won’t survive.” I didn’t know if this was a reference to
just the snake or to herself as well, but I regretted pointing out that she impris-
oned the snake just as others imprisoned her. Even more, I regretted that my
response to her original question—“do you like snakes”—was heard through
the lens of orienting to her as, in the first instance, a him and thinking the
reference to his snake was a reference to his penis.
In sharp contrast, in another exchange, I was struck by how, in the first
instance, I found myself “naturally” orienting to an interviewee as female. On
the way out of the interview room, a very warm and talkative Latina trans-
gender inmate and I walked through a day room that had a television on with
Hillary Clinton giving a stump speech during her run for president. Noticing
this, the transgender inmate turned to me, asked me about the presidential
race, and made a point of telling me “we girls want Hillary.” She explained
that they—the transgender inmates in this prison—want “the girl” to be presi-
dent because (a) it was about time a girl was president and (b) Hillary is
“tough and smart and can handle herself.” She clearly related to Hillary’s
campaign as, to quote her, “the chance for the first woman president.” For
her, this campaign signaled that tough and smart women who can handle
themselves can go far (now). When I revealed that I too was a Hillary sup-
porter she seemed pleased and asked: “Are you a real girl?” When I said
“yes,” she spontaneously gently touched my forearm—something inmates
are never supposed to do (i.e., touch a visitor), but is a routine feature of
many interactions outside of prison—smiled, and said, “Oh, that must be
nice.” She went on to emphasize that the “other girls” are all for Hillary, too,
and asked me if I thought Hillary would win in a world that, according to her,
“is not easy on girls of any type.” Despite her making a distinction between
“real girls” and herself, I oriented to her in this interaction as “another girl.”
The final example occurs outside the parameters of an interview and
involves a moment of engagement with an inmate who does not self-identify
as transgender but was nonetheless happy to explain “prison types” to me
while we were both waiting in a hallway. While I was standing in a hallway
waiting for officers to escort another inmate to the building in which I was
Jenness 541
conducting interviews, a Latino inmate who appeared to be in his mid 20s

was sitting on a bench waiting to be escorted back to his housing unit when
he initiated a discussion. He began by revealing to me that he knew why I was
waiting in the hallway, indicating that I was “the professor in charge of the
research by the university” as opposed to one of the other interviewers.
Because he had been escorted to an interview room but was not interviewed,
he rightly surmised that we were there to interview some inmates and not
others. He volunteered to me that he is not transgender and is not on hor-
mones, but that he is a “gay boy from [name of his home town].” I seized the
moment to ask him the difference between being a gay boy and being trans-
gender, and he gladly described the difference between three (easily con-
fused) types of inmates:
Gay boys are men who have feminine characteristics. They don’t want
to be girls. They are more like pretty boys, but they are boys.
Transgenders want to be the girls. They want hormones, they want
boobs to look like girls. They tend to think they were born to be girls
and they are always bottoms. I don’t want boobs, no way; and, I’m not
always a bottom, but I like that. Homosexual men are just masculine
men—they don’t want and they don’t have feminine characteristics.
They are men men—like the Village People, you know that group?
I answered “yes” and asked “what about sexually?” He replied: “You

wouldn’t know they were homosexual, they are almost always tops, but
you’ll find about 25 percent go both ways. Have you heard about gunsling-
ers?” I said: “I’ve heard of them.”19 Thereafter he explained: “The gay boys
and the tgs are all in one group, we get along, we’re like community. We have
to stick together in here.” According to him, getting along was made easier
insofar as the CDCR personnel can’t tell them apart. When I commented that
his eyebrows were shaped in the same way many transgender inmates do
their eyebrows, he gleefully replied: “Oh, thank you, I try to keep them look-
ing good.” Throughout this study, I came to learn that carefully plucked eye-
brows designed to reveal high—some would say exaggerated—arches is a
key signifier of something important related to gender presentation, gender
identity, sexual orientation, and sexual attraction—a recognizable marker of
femininity. Their own sense of self along these lines complicates any picture
of transgender prisoners as a homogeneous group.
Likewise, interview data from this study reveal that transgender inmates
are not a homogenous group in terms of a handful of dimensions related to
the self and identity, including: continuity in terms of presenting as female,
Table 1. Distribution of Transgender Inmates in California Prisons for Men

Presenting as Female Before and After Incarceration
Expected female presentation upon release from prison
Yes No Total
n Percentage n Percentage n Percentage

Female presentation Yes 237 76.7 16 5.2 253 81.9
prior to most
recent incarceration
No 42 13.6 14 4.5 56 18.1
Total 279 90.3 30 9.7 309 100
gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual attraction(s). Reported in Table

1, over three-fourths of transgender inmates presented as female outside of
prison and anticipate presenting as female if/when they are released from
prison. Through continuity of presentation along these lines, these transgen-
der inmates display consistency between their gender presentation and their
status as transgender both inside and outside of prison. For them, prison life
does not disrupt this particular dimension of how they situate socially and in
terms of their presentation of self as gendered beings.
In contrast, a little less than a quarter of transgender inmates in prison
report more discontinuity along these lines. Specifically, 13.6 percent did not
present as female prior to their most recent incarceration, but plan to present
as female if/when they leave prison; 5.2 percent presented as female prior to
their most recent incarceration, but do not plan to present as female if/when
they leave prison; and a little less than 5 percent did not present as female
before their most recent incarceration and do not plan to present as female if/
when they leave prison. For some transgender inmates, then, being transgen-
der is imported into prison and for others, becoming transgender—at least
in terms of presenting as female—is a life event that occurs for the first time
in prison. Obviously, this cuts against the view that men who cannot make it
in prison become queens or transgender (Donaldson 2003; Fleisher and
Krienert 2006).
Transgender inmates report a range of labels to describe themselves. The
vast majority (77.4 percent) identify as female when asked about their gender
identity, with considerably fewer identifying as “male and female” (14 per-
cent), “other” or “it depends” (3.5 percent), “neither female nor male” (3.2
percent), and “male” (3.2 percent). In one case, an inmate identified as
Jenness 543
hermaphrodite and emphasized that “federal papers” affirmed the identity

with legal standing.
Transgender inmates also self-identify with a range of sexual orientations.
A third (33.3 percent) of transgender inmates in California prisons identify as
“homosexual,” while 19.4 percent identify their sexual orientation as “trans-
gender,” 18.1 percent identify as heterosexual, 11.3 percent identify as bisex-
ual, and the remaining 17.8 percent identify as something else. “Something
else” includes a range of self-signifiers, such as: “a girl transsexual,” “a
queen that likes men,” “androgynous,” “both transgender and heterosexual,”
“heterosexual in a transgender world,” “homosexual and transgender,” “I’m
my mother’s daughter,” “just sexual,” “just normal,” “just myself,” “just a
person,” “just natural,” “just me,” and “human.”
Finally, there is less variation in sexual attractions for transgender inmates
in California prisons. The majority of transgender inmates are sexually
attracted to men (81.9 percent), but a considerable minority indicated being
attracted to both men and women (15.6 percent). Only 1.3 percent of trans-
gender inmates reported being sexually attracted to women only. The remain-
ing respondents reported being sexually attracted to “neither” men nor
women or some combination of “transgender” or “transsexual” persons and
women. This pattern is not specific to the prison environment. The vast
majority of transgender inmates (75.8 percent) report being attracted to men
outside of prison and inside prison, effectively dispelling the notion that they
turn to men as an adaptation to being in a sex-segregated environment in
which women (as objects of attraction) are not available.
Clearly, then, transgender prisoners are a heterogeneous group with whom
I interacted for the purposes of this study. Their membership in an array of
social categories is complicated by their location in prison and by the larger
sex/gender system in which they reside and to which they respond. The com-
plexity of social categorization became particularly clear toward the end of
data collection when, I presumed, data collection had become routine and I
was beginning to think “saturation” had been reached. In one of the final
prisons in which I collected data, I was taken to a visiting room to do inter-
views, and as I approached the visiting room, I saw what appeared to be all
the transgender inmates—I would estimate about thirty inmates—standing in
a very unorganized single file line waiting for us (I was with two other inter-
viewers). The transgender inmates were talking, giggling, calling out to us,
and otherwise enjoying being out of “lockdown” (the officer informed me
that they had been on “lockdown” status for months). As I approached the
(pseudo) line of transgender inmates to explain why we were there and
how I hoped we could proceed, an inmate toward the end of the line yelled,
“We’ve got lesbians!” I assumed this was a comment about me or us—the

interviewers—directed to the other transgender inmates in the makeshift sin-
gle file line. The two interviewers who were with me receded into the back-
ground as I ignored the comment, and I stepped forward to introduce myself
to the entire group, explain who we were and why we were there, and ask for
their cooperation. Slightly altered, the comment—“the lesbians are here”—
was delivered again. And, again I ignored it. Later that day, toward the end of
a very long day of non-stop interviewing, the person I was interviewing
responded to a question about involvement in “marriage-like relationships”
by recalling her earlier comments—“we’ve got lesbians.” She answered “no”
to my specific question, and then she went further to explain: “But we do
have some lesbians here. I thought you’d want to talk with them. I tried to get
them to the front of the line.” At that moment, I learned she was not referenc-
ing me or any other member of the research team when she yelled, “We’ve
got lesbians.” Rather, she was trying to put forth the most interesting cases
for us to interview. Later, during debriefing, another interviewer confirmed
that she had interviewed two transgender inmates, each of whom confirmed
they were part of a couple with another transgender inmate. At this point, my
stereotype defied reality.
Moments like this one, including the debriefing that followed it, required
that we complicate the picture of transgender inmates in men’s prisons. In
this case, it resulted in recognizing the presence of lesbian transgender
inmates in prisons for men as an anomalous configuration. More broadly, the
ethnographic information presented throughout the article, coupled with the
self-report data presented earlier, ensured that transgender inmates in prisons
for men do not easily fit into any one social recognizable category. This is the
“people” part of the main title.
Discussion
Although there are many more empirical findings to be revealed in publica-
tions resulting from the research described in this article, I chose to conclude
the previous section with descriptive quantitative findings related to presen-
tation of self/identity/attraction and the exchange on transgender lesbians
in order to emphasize the diversity of the transgender population in men’s
prisons in California (cf., Jenness, Sexton, et al. 2010; Sexton, Jenness, and
Sumner 2010; Sumner 2009). These specific findings, coupled with other
ethnographic data presented here, render one overarching conclusion beyond
dispute. Namely, the categorization commitments and processes revealed
by experts, CDCR personnel, and researchers clearly eclipse the complex
Jenness 545
configurations of meaning embraced by this population of prisoners and

around which they organize their lives and navigate prison environments.
This conclusion, I am sure, would not have been revealed as clearly and in
ways that shed insight into the larger policy questions related to where best to
house transgender inmates and basic sociological questions about the organi-
zation and doing of gender without the field work described previously. It
would not, for example, be the same data if I would have interviewed trans-
gender parolees and asked them about their experiences in prison(s).
The research described in this article turned out to be the opposite of what
Cullen (2010, 25) recently described as “antiseptic criminology.” While anti-
septic criminology removes people from the real world, the research protocol
for this work entailed going into the world of the target population and spend-
ing hundreds of hours in that world—their world. By going into prisons to
collect original data from transgender inmates, I benefitted immensely from
multiple points of view related to transgender prisoners—who they are, how
they present and behave outside the confines of a formal interview, and how
they are seen by the people who surround them and contribute to their envi-
ronment and fate. To quote Gans (1999, 540), I was able to “observe what
people do” in addition to gather reports of “what people say about what they
do.” This is what I am referring to as a “soft mixed methods” approach to
understanding this population of prisoners.
Although the research described in this article was first and foremost
driven by policy questions and an attendant commitment to quantitative data
collection, I was able to gain an invaluable ethnographic sense of the context
in which transgender prisoners live and to which they respond. This type of
engagement in the field routinely served to complicate the questions asked,
the empirical portrayal of transgender inmates, and the sociological sense-
making surrounding both the policy and basic concerns that undergird this
work. Indeed, it is difficult for me to make sense of this diverse population
without the ethnographic engagement that, at times, only punctuated the
work. Fortunately, this punctuation served to make the project messy by
revealing the uncontested gender order that underpins prison life as well as
the lived experience of gender and sexuality that contextualizes and thus per-
meates the lives of transgender inmates in prisons for men.
Ironically, messy is often something both researchers and transgender
prisoners strive to avoid. Researchers strive to avoid it, or at least mitigate it,
in the name of rigor, reliability, and validity. Transgender prisoners report a
desire to avoid “messy” situations because they inevitably lead to undesirable
outcomes. For them, “messy” is a term used to refer to “drama” (usually born
of gossip or competition for the attention of men) or conflict between other
transgender inmates and/or the men in prison (Sumner 2009, 180). For me, in
this case of this research, a messy terrain served as a catalyst for a more
nuanced sociological understanding of the social organization of gender and
sexuality in California prisons. To use Goffman’s (1963) term again, the “pri-
mal sociological scenes” described in this article provided the windows
through which the identities, desires, and performativity of transgender pris-
oners were rendered sociologically sensible—or at least more sensible. This,
in turn, facilitated more thorough thinking about the policy question—where
to house them to keep them safe in light of the social organization of sex,
sexuality, and gender in prisons—while also stimulating an analysis of gen-
der that I refer to as “the Olympics of gender authenticity” (Jenness and
Fenstermaker In Progress).
Thinking about it this way harkens back to O’Brien’s (2008) recently pub-
lished presidential address to the Pacific Sociological Association. She
reminds us that social life is messy and as a result the practice of sociology is
filled with tension, contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity. She reminds us
that the impact and resonance of sociological knowledge are enhanced when
we open ourselves to the tensions and contradictions we observe and experi-
ence in our work as sociologists. My own experiences in the field and with
the “messiness” and complexity of social life ultimately point to the impor-
tance of methodological flexibility that allows ethnography to seep into even
the most non-ethnographic studies and be utilized for analytic purposes when
addressing policy questions. Therefore, I argue for the value of adopting what
I call a “soft mixed methods” approach when doing non-ethnographic work
designed to inform policy. To do so stimulates sociological imagination and,
as I argue in this article, can ultimately provide answers to policy questions
that might otherwise go unaddressed empirically.
Author’s Note
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Pacific
Sociological Association in San Diego, California, 2009.
Acknowledgments
Jennifer Sumner and Lori Sexton made significant contributions to this article by
serving as project managers on the larger project from which this article derives and
collaborating on the analysis of data that derives from this project. Also, I would like
to thank Jodi O’Brien for contributing to this article by engaging in routine and con-
sequential dialogue about the project from the beginning, encouraging me to write
this article, and providing useful comments on an earlier version. Finally, I would like
Jenness 547
to thank the following contributors for assistance with data collection and interpreta-
tion: the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR’s)
Offender Information Services Branch and the CDCR’s Office of Research as well as
key CDCR personnel, including Nola Grannis, and especially Suzan Hubbard and
Wendy Still; the CDCR wardens who made their prisons available to us and their staff
who ensured we could conduct face-to-face interviews with hundreds of transgender
inmates in a confidential setting; academic colleagues, including Francesca Barocio,
Victoria Basolo, Kitty Calavita, Sarah Fenstermaker, Ryken Grattet, Laura Grindstaff,
Cheryl Maxson, Merry Morash, and Joan Petersilia; many people outside the CDCR
and academic settings who offered their expertise, including Patrick Callahan, Dr.
Lori Kohler, Alexander L. Lee, Julie Marin, Linda McFarlane, Andie Moss, Lovisa
Stannow, Dr. Denise Taylor, and Jeanne Woodford; a team of hardworking and tal-
ented research assistants, including Akhila Ananth, Lyndsay Boggess, Tim Goddard,
Philip Goodman, Kristy Matsuda, Randy Myers, Gabriela Noriega, Lynn Pazzani,
and Sylvia Valenzuela; and most importantly, hundreds of transgender inmates in
California prisons who agreed to be interviewed, thus making it possible to under-
stand their lives in prison.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research
and/or authorship of this article:
This project was funded by the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation and the School of Social Ecology at the University of California,
Irvine.
Notes
1. Giraldo v. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Case
No. CGC-07-461473, Superior Court of California, City and County of San
Francisco.
2. For a picture of Giraldo entering San Francisco Superior Court, see http://www
.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=2072, last visited March 26,
2010.
3. The use of both masculine and feminine pronouns to refer to the plaintiff in this
case is purposeful and reflects the fact that even gender pronoun use, as a proxy
for designating types of social beings, is contested terrain in courts as well as in
prisons.
4. This was arguably most vivid in a document the State filed that contained a
motion that reads: “Defendants move this court to issue an order in limine pre-
venting plaintiff’s attorneys from referring to plaintiff in the feminine at trial.
Additionally, defendants request that the Court issue an order preventing plain-
tiff’s attorney from attiring plaintiff in woman’s [sic] clothing. Argument. The
Court should issue an order preventing plaintiff’s attorneys from referring to
plaintiff in the feminine or using feminine pronouns at trial because such prac-
tices raise a danger of prejudice and of misleading of the jury. (Evid. Code, §
352; Garfield v. Russell (1967) 251 Cal.App.2d 275, 279.) Specifically, the jury
would be unduly prejudiced against defendants if the jury gets the impression
that defendants housed a female individual in a male prison. This would be an
inevitable conclusion from having plaintiff’s attorneys referring to plaintiff in
the feminine or attiring plaintiff in feminine clothing. Additionally, an order in
limine should be issued because allowing plaintiff’s attorneys to address plaintiff
in the feminine or attiring him in female clothing would confuse the jury. All
the documentation regarding plaintiff that will be submitted at trial will refer to
“Edwin Giraldo.” Similarly, most (if not all) of the witnesses know plaintiff by
his legal name. Thus, having attorneys and witnesses continually switch from one
name (or gender) to the other in referring to plaintiff will cause undue confusion
for the jury” (Defendants’ Motion in Limine No. 4 in Giraldo v. The California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, et al. CGC-07-461473, page 2).
5. The “dodge” could prove temporary. On November 14, 2008, the District Court
of Appeals overturned the trial judge’s ruling, saying a jailer who holds a pris-
oner in custody must take reasonable steps to protect that prisoner from foresee-
able injuries. The ruling allows Giraldo to proceed with the claim that negligence
by Folsom employees was a cause of the assaults.
6. This is telling in an era in which “evidence based corrections” is embraced by
many state departments of corrections (Petersilia 2008a, 2008b) and evidence is
most easily—if not exclusively—identifiable as quantitative data, quantitative
analyses, and quantitative findings (but, see Gillespie and Leffler 1987).
7. For example, a recent report by the Little Hoover Commission, an independent
bipartisan state oversight agency charged with investigating state government
operations, declared: “the bare facts have earned California’s Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation an ignoble distinction for systemic failure” (Little
Hoover Commission 2007, np). This report is not alone in declaring the Cali-
fornia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) a dysfunctional
organization.
8. Prior to collecting data, I had to secure necessary approvals from three regulatory
entities: the Institutional Review Board at the University of California, Irvine; the
Office of Research at the CDCR; and the California Health and Human Services
Jenness 549
Agency/Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects in Sacramento, Cali-

fornia. This arduous, but not impossible, task took approximately seven months.
Along the way, many challenges were confronted, including: identifying the “tar-
get population” to be researched, as described in this article; ensuring credible
informed consent from those participating in the study; establishing mechanisms
and safeguards to protect the confidentiality and safety of those participating in
the study; and establishing protocols for responding to situations in which study
participants are (re)traumatized by revealing sensitive information in response to
our efforts to collect self-report data. Shortly after data collection was complete,
I was subjected to an audit by the University of California, Irvine and passed
with flying colors. Tellingly, unlike other researchers (see e.g., Zwerman and
Gardner 1986, 293), this research was not “impeded by the state’s intrusion into
the research project” and the “denial of ‘scholar’s privileges’” with respect to
both access to prisoners and confidential settings in which original face-to-face
interview data could be collected.
9. This represents the total population of CDCR prisons in April 2008, just a few
weeks prior to the commencement of data collection in the field (see http://
www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_Branch/
Monthly/TPOP1A/TPOP1Ad0804.pdf, last retrieved January 19, 2009).
10. In California, the Administrative Procedure Act (Government Code §§ 11340-
11359) and the Penal Code § 5058 provide the CDCR with broad discretion to
create and implement rules and regulations for the administration of the prisons,
including where to house prisoners after they are sentenced by the courts. The
CDCR routinely assigns convicted felons to men’s or women’s prisons on the
basis of their genitalia. Accordingly, when processing inmates through the cor-
rections system, the first determination—whether to send the person to a men’s
or a women’s prison—is made via a “genitalia-based” approach rather than an
“identity-based” approach (for analyses along these lines, see Rosenblum 2000).
While in the custody of the CDCR, inmates are housed in prisons according
to their biological sex rather than their gender identity. Of course, beyond bio-
logical sex, inmates are routinely classified and assigned housing according to
other individual characteristics, such as sex offender status, sexual orientation,
gang status, custody level, and race/ethnicity. Nonetheless, in the first instance
“sex” is the sole consideration when determining which type of prison—men’s
or women’s—transgender inmates are to be housed in, with men going to men’s
prisons, women going to women’s prisons, and transgender women going to
men’s prisons.
11. This pattern of concentration, which in no way results in all transgender inmates
being housed in these three prisons, is the outcome of numerous considerations,
including: the efficient provision of medical services (e.g., hormonal treatment,
HIV treatment), programming resources at each facility, the management of

overcrowding across the system, and operational particularities associated with
California’s mission-based prisons for adult men.
12. Throughout this article, research sites in this study are referred to as prisons. This
designation includes reception centers and excludes fire camps.
13. A similar four-pronged criteria was used for data collection in prisons for women.
14. If, upon arrival at a prison, we learned that an inmate on our list had been trans-
ferred to a prison at which we had not yet collected data, we made every effort to
interview the inmate at that prison; however, if an inmate on our list transferred
to a prison from which we had already collected data, we did not return to that
prison to interview the inmate. Going back to prisons for a second round of data
collection was not feasible from the point of view of our budget, our energy, and
our timeline. As the research assistant in charge of managing the lists reported
in an e-mail to the PI: “One thing I’ve learned from spending time with the lists
today—we just have to go to a facility and move on (except for going back for
Spanish speakers). If we tried to go back and get people that should have been
there, the rotation through the facilities would be endless” (e-mail communica-
tion dated May 16, 2008).
15. Although not discussed here, we also identified four transgender inmates in a
prison for women. Three of these inmates completed an interview. These inter-
views were exceptionally illuminating, both in and of themselves and in light of
interviews conducted in men’s prisons.
16. Names have been changed.
17. This was a methodological luxury I granted to myself, but I did not grant to the
graduate student researchers who served as interviewers on this project. I was
able to “languish” in the field while they were instructed to move through inter-
views more quickly, including “moving on” if a person does not meet the study
eligibility requirements. Likewise, my interviews, on average, went longer than
theirs. This was a decision I made that attended to two competing goals: (1) effi-
ciently running up the number of cases in the study in anticipation of quantitative
analyses and (2) gaining qualitative understanding of prison life for transgender
inmates.
18. A transgender inmate described a gunslinger as follows in an interview: “Some-
one who swings both ways—who can catch and pitch. For example, femmed-out
homosexuals who like it both ways. They can take hormones, have breasts, but
go both ways. In private they will pitch and catch.”
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G. Harkness, V. Kennedy, R. Dingwall, P. C. Rosenblatt, A. Ryen, and R. Shay.
2003. After the Interview. Qualitative Sociology 26 (1): 93-110.
Zwerman, G., and G. Gardner. 1986. Obstacles to research in a state prison: Regu-
lated, segregated, and under surveillance. Qualitative Sociology 9 (3): 293-300.
Bio
Valerie Jenness is a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society
and the Department of Sociology and she is interim dean of the School of Social
Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the links
between deviance and social control; the politics of crime control; social movements
and social change; and corrections and public policy. She is the author of three books
and many articles published in sociology, law, and criminology journals; the recipient
of awards from the American Sociological Association, Society for the Study of
Social Problems, the Pacific Sociological Association, and the University of
California; and Past President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and
Past Editor of Contemporary Sociology.

From Policy To Prisoners To People - A "Soft Mixed Methods" Approach To Studying Transgender Prisoners

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Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

From Policy to Prisoners 39(5) 517­–553

Fieldnotes taken in a California prison for men,

In the summer of 2007, Alexis Giraldo, a transgender parolee who served

multiple opportunities to do so. They pointed to the consensual nature of his

Setting the Stage: Making the Case for Policy

A plethora of work has critically examined the many challenges that

Capitalizing on an Historic Moment and the Need

in-prison research on sexual assault, which revealed that transgender inmates

Getting in the Golden State’s Prisons in the Age

Observational studies depicting the everyday world of inmates all but

As Edward Abbey (1975) wrote, “There is science, logic, reason; there

approximately 160,000 adult prisoners incarcerated in thirty-three prisons in

Identifying, Accessing, and Understanding

gender binary resulted in routine automatic placement along these lines—so

Quite unexpectedly, however, the process whereby I attempted to identify,

Consulting with Experts to Define and Operationalize

identifies, simply, as “a woman” (who underwent “anatomical corrections” to

He went further to admonish me for wasting valuable research time trying to

(physical or mental) for something related to how they present themselves or

Working with CDCR Administrators to Identify Transgender

criteria by which I hoped to identify transgender inmates in California pris-

•• Male inmates who present themselves as female, transgender, or

a result of an urgent medical or psychiatric appointment; and inmates—

I sat down to interview an inmate, a large, African-American, bald,

supposed to do.” Throughout our conversation, he routinely apolo-

Working with CDCR Personnel in the Field

Debriefing with Fellow Researchers

myself it’s not awful because technically we don’t know if “he” is

Engaging with the Transgender Prisoners

Serpentes. I laughed, and she asked, “What’s so funny?” I said, “Nothing”

conducting interviews, a Latino inmate who appeared to be in his mid 20s

I answered “yes” and asked “what about sexually?” He replied: “You

Table 1. Distribution of Transgender Inmates in California Prisons for Men

Expected female presentation upon release from prison

n Percentage n Percentage n Percentage

gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual attraction(s). Reported in Table

hermaphrodite and emphasized that “federal papers” affirmed the identity

“We’ve got lesbians!” I assumed this was a comment about me or us—the

configurations of meaning embraced by this population of prisoners and

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Agency/Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects in Sacramento, Cali-

HIV treatment), programming resources at each facility, the management of

Bosworth, M. 1999. Engendering resistance: Agency and power in women’s prisons.

Jenness, V., and S. Fenstermaker. In Progress. Agnes goes to prison: An empiri-

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From Policy to Prisoners 39(5) 517–553