We Have to Talk About V-Coding

Extreme Content Warning for Sexual and Physical Violence.

Introduction

I’ve been seeing this 2013 Advocate article¹ begin to make the rounds again, as it does periodically, and that has me thinking again about how (despite recent efforts)² queer people (and especially trans people) lack a coherent and consistent theory of the state. For a group that faces such rampant and targeted marginalization and subjugation by the state³, I feel like this is not only an analytical weakness, but represents a gap in our knowledge and ability to advocate for ourselves and each other. Trans people face a uniquely horrific type of violence from the state, and nowhere is this more present than in the prison system⁴—regardless of which population transgender people are put within.⁵⁶

There are many practices towards transgender people in prison that are beyond unacceptable that people regularly hear about, solitary confinement being among the primary practices seen by many.⁷ There are of course, practices such as “V-Coding” a documented behavior that receives little coverage; it is infuriating that there is limited discussion of V-Coding as even if it were highly uncommon (the actual rate of occurrence is impossible to pin down) it’s depravity would warrant intense conversation and scrutiny.

I want to make clear that I am a non-incarcerated person and have never been incarcerated. In my research I have tried my hardest to center quotes and stories from incarcerated transgender people, but much of what I discuss will merely repeat what incarcerated transgender people already know. The use of academic sources is not meant to imply that incarcerated peoples’ understandings and experience is less important or less valid as a source. Without the first-hand accounts I quote from in this piece and my discussions with transgender women in my own life who have faced one form of incarceration or another I could not have finished this piece.

Why this topic? Why now?

Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death. This is true in several senses. Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life. Interpretations in law also constitute justifications for violence which has already occurred or which is about to occur. When interpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these organized, social practices of violence. Neither legal interpretation nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from one another. — Robert M. Cover, Violence and the Word.⁸

This quote, from the late legal scholar Robert Cover emphasizes the importance of violence when discussing laws. “Anti-Trans Laws” are not just laws which limit the freedom, autonomy, and rights of transgender people, they are threats—no, promises—of violence, they encourage and permit violence against trans people, and justify the violence which has historically occurred against trans people and our communities.

Anti-Trans laws are not going to be fought in state houses and in courtrooms. Whatever happens in those “hallowed halls” will not look like the struggle for trans liberation. The fight against these laws will look like mourning another sister, a brother, our trans siblings pushed ever-further to the margins and under the heel of an increasingly violent police state. This topic is essential to talk about because we all-too-often end our analyses at incarceration, with little regard for the suffering that happens behind bars. As the criminalization of trans lives, communities and our tools for survival (especially sex work⁹) get more markedly intense, we need to deeply and seriously reckon with what happens after criminalization and look to the lives of transgender people—especially transgender women—behind bars.

It is important to think about this, and for our imaginings to include incarcerated transgender people, who are often representative of the most vulnerable elements of our community. As we see criminalization increase both in the general sense of an ever-widening police state¹⁰ and more and more budgets go to brutal law enforcement instead of social programs¹¹ our understanding of the universe of trans experience must necessarily extend behind bars.

Before any discussion of V-Coding I want to first lay out the realities of transgender individuals and their encounters with police, jails, prisons, and incarceration in general. Following this discussion I will dive into solitary confinement, V-Coding, and other practices, before concluding with my final thoughts.

Trans People and the Justice System

Transgender people are vastly more likely to come into contact than cisgender people. 66.3% of “TGNCNB” (transgender, gender non-conforming, non-binary) respondents in a 2022 survey reported having contact with police in the last five years.¹² Transgender people are also at much higher risk for incarceration with nearly one-third (31.4%) having been detained in one form or another in the past five years.¹³ Much of this data is all from before the “hockey stick” of anti-trans laws which began in 2021 and continues in 2024.¹⁴ A February 2016 report by the Center for American Progress and the Movement Advancement Project found that 16% of transgender people (and 21% of transgender women) had been incarcerated in either jail or prison in their lifetime.¹⁵ This is more than three times higher (over four times higher for transgender women) than the general population which is incarcerated at around 5%.¹⁶ Of transgender people who are incarcerated, almost one half, (47%) are Black.¹⁷ This is the same rate at which transgender women in men’s prisons who have experienced homelessness.¹⁸

These trends and this data shows that transgender people, particularly Black transgender women are extremely vulnerable before their incarceration and therefore are vastly more likely than the general population to be incarcerated. This means that transgender people are therefore more likely than the general population to face violence while incarcerated. Transgender people who are incarcerated are also very likely to face violence. From the 2022 report, “Sexual assault of LGBTQ+ people is a pervasive problem in prison settings, so much so that the U.S. Supreme court has specifically articulated the constitutional duty of prison officials to protect vulnerable people from unnecessary risks of harm from sexual violence in their custody.”¹⁹ TGNCNB people who are incarcerated report rampant sexual abuse.

Transgender people are not somehow made less marginalized or safer by incarceration. As later discussed, many transgender people are subjected to horrific violence while incarcerated. Prisons, jails, and other forms of detention are not free of the external biases and prejudices. It is easy to see people ‘disappear’ behind bars, without understanding that within systems of incarceration not only are transgender people subjected to the same kinds of violence as on the outside, but experience acute versions of this violence.

Transgender people also face other forms of bias and discrimination. In a 2018 study, ProPublica found that in 74 out of 85 investigations into the murder of transgender people, the victims were identified by their deadnames.²⁰ Transgender people are often de-gendered, misgendered, and deadnamed throughout their interactions with law enforcement, the courts, and within prisons and jails. This form of humiliation and violence can lead to severe mental health consequences, as any transgender person knows. I do not find it beyond belief that some of this misgendering, deadnaming, and subsequent ridicule is an intentional tactic to further humiliate and harass transgender women by prison guards, police, judges, prosecutors, and other incarcerated people.

V-Coding

V-Coding is a process where transgender women who are incarcerated within men’s prisons are explicitly placed in cells with cis men who are known to be aggressive.²¹ These women are placed within these cells to pacify, reward, incentivize or otherwise influence the behavior of the cisgender men. Transgender women are effectively “pimped out” as a form of social control. The abuse they suffer is a systemic dehumanization based on the fetishization of the transgender body and transmisogyny. This practice is beyond cruel, and unfortunately common.

“Forced boarding by a third party for sexual contact, or in prison “V-coding,” on the streets would be seen as pimping, as Kim Love called it. The placement of such coercion inside of prison, however, serves to locate pimping as a central part of a transwoman’s sentence. Most acts performed by prison staff, violent or not, are unfortunately upheld as the norm of prison culture” (emphasis added").²² Transgender women are systemically made vulnerable to sexual violence by being denied bras, proper clothing, and having their reports of abuse ignored, disbelieved, or downplayed.²³ This systematization of violence creates scenes like the ones described by Paula Rae Witherspoon, a “Trasnssexual Woman incarcerated in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.” Witherspoon writes,

“I was put in a caged area where over 200 men witnessed, gawked, and made fun of me. Some made passes, some made lewd comments, and others made known their desire to have sex with me. The officers shouted comments at me like “Yea, now you got to pull your nuts back out and be a man,” “Your cellie is going to REALLY be glad to see you,” and “Are those REAL tits or silicone?” Then I was forced to strip off my clothes, bra, panties and stand nude in front of them while I changed clothes. This generated a lot of “cat calls,” whistles, and more lewd comments.”

—Paula Rae Witherspoon, “My Story” Captive Genders²⁴

I do not want to give the impression that these experiences are necessarily “universal,'“ however it is important to note that these stories are common or at least common to a degree that (1) prison guards feel comfortable acting like this, (2) nobody in these stories treats these events as particularly exceptional, (3) elements of the story—the presence of cameras, colleagues and supervisors—indicates to me that nobody engaging in this behavior or implementing these policies believes that there will be any consequences for their actions.

Solitary Confinement

Many transgender women are put in solitary confinement as a way to avoid the troubles that could befall them in the “general population.” While some narratives of solitary confinement as it pertains to trans people is that it is done for the protection of trans women, in the majority of cases it is still used as a form of punishment. ²⁵ Solitary confinement has long been seen a form of torture²⁶; so even if it is for the “protection” of trans women in prisons, this form of “protection” is still torture.

Transgender people who choose defend themselves from violence, v-coding, and violence (wether acute or systemic) often find themselves forced into solitary confinement as a punishment which can lead to parole being denied.²⁷

Intersectional Violence

V-Coding, the systemization of sexual and physical violence specifically targeted towards incarcerated transgender women, solitary confinement, transmisogyny, and racism fuels an extreme violence against trans women, and specifically Black trans women. One of the other axes of violence is the withholding of life-saving care. As we discuss transwomen, this takes two forms. The first is the denial of HRT and other gender-affirming care (including female or feminine clothings). The second is the denial of appropriate treatments for HIV/AIDS. From Captive Genders,

Victoria Arellano’s official cause of death was AIDS-related infections. But really the cause of death was San Pedro’s refusal to give her the medicine which was sustaining her life. The death of Victoria Arellano at the hands of the state serves as a testament to the ways that transgendered [sic] immigrants have a particularly violent relationship with the prison industrial complex…Likewise, the numerous articles written on Victoria’s death, with the exception of very few, make little to no reference to transgendered [sic] people’s experiences with incarceration or detention. The horrific treatment of Victoria was attributed solely to the detention facility’s failure to provide for the health of its detainees; with no mention of the ways that the dehumanizing treatment was also very much compounded by the fact that she was a transgendered [sic] woman, in addition to being HIV-positive.

— Michelle C. Potts, “Regulatory Sites: Management Confinement, and HIV/AIDS,” Captive Genders²⁸

Trans people, generally have a very difficult time accessing quality healthcare while incarcerated.²⁹ In a survey conducted by the Vera Institute for Justice, 74% of respondents requested medication to support their transition. 47% received this care, 21% were denied this care, and 32% were denied were denied for a number of reasons, most common that they did not meet the criteria set by the Department of Corrections. Some respondents reported, “…that they were unable to access medication because they could not get a medical appointment, or because staff “forgot” to distribute the medication or did not facilitate access.”³⁰

Collectively the way transgender people are treated, medically, within the various systems of incarceration reflects, at best, a degree of recklessness with the physical and mental well-being of transgender people, largely transgender women; at worst the treatment of transgender people in prisons and jails is a knowing process of using an existing system of dehumanization to torture and abuse transgender and gender non-conforming people out of misogynistic power or the perverse enjoyment of watching “the other” suffer.

Conclusion

The status quo is a passivity that watches as the machine of state lets trans women die and be killed. This ‘social murder’ is an explicitly sought feature. Nobody is taking the strides to undo it. Even the most aggressive legislation seems to have had little effect on these realities.

As states like Texas, Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kansas, Florida, Montana, Alabama, West Virginia, Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wyoming pass laws which narrowly define gender to be sex assigned at birth,³¹³² we can see an impending reality: more transgender women are going to be incarcerated in men’s prisons. While some transgender women may prefer being incarcerated in men’s prisons (about 35%) most transgender people would prefer to be incarcerated in women’s prisons.³³

This means that while already most transgender people who are incarcerated are incarcerated in men’s facilities this number will likely go up in states which will lack protections for transgender people. Not only will this problem get worse, the abilities for recourse will diminish. As transphobic laws begin to take effect all over the country, states which are already unsafe present the afterlife of criminalization to be what amounts to torture, dehumanization, and systematized rape. This is not just a few prison guards or violent inmates, but rather a system which sees transgender women as less-than-human and therefore either acceptable targets (or possibly deserving) of violence.

Transgender people are being forced into ever more precarity, increasing our contact with the police, increasing the scrutiny the state puts on us. We live in an ever-narrowing field of possible behavior. Many transgender women sell drugs, are sex workers, work under the table, or engage in criminal activity to get by. This is one method that criminalization is increasing. These behaviors are increasingly criminalized in the past few years or are made more dangerous. In addition to this increasing criminalization of survival, there is the increased criminalization of transness itself. This combination spells out a future where transgender people need to think about how to extend our solidarity to our sisters, brothers, and siblings behind bars.

The horizon is clear: abolition. There is no other policy reccomendation I can make. The system of brutality which leads to v-coding and worse is not exceptional, it is intentional. It is the system, it is integral to the system. There is no prison without v-coding, and there is no v-coding without prison. Abolition is the only path forward.

1. Sunnivie Brydum, “WATCH: Transgender Woman Arrested for Exposing Breasts, Jailed With Men.” The Advocate, April 17, 2013. https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/04/17/watch-transgender-woman-arrested-exposing-breasts-jailed-men

2. Samuel Huneke A Queer Theory of The State, Floating Opera Press, 2023

3. Movement Advancement Project, Freedom Under Fire: The Far Right’s Battle To Control America, March 2024 https://www.mapresearch.org/file/Freedom-Under-Fire-report-MAP.pdf

4. Kelsie Chesnut & Jennifer Peirce, Advancing Transgender Justice: Illuminating Trans Lives Behind and Beyond Bars. Vera Institute of Justice.February 2024. https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/advancing-transgender-justice.pdf

5. Ashley Diamond “I’m a Trans Woman Locked in a Men’s Prison. I’m fighting to Be Free.” Them. May 14, 2021 https://www.them.us/story/ashley-diamond-op-ed-trans-woman-lawsuit-abuse-mens-prison

6. Jason Alatidd, “Transgender inmate at Kansas women’s Prison didn’t convince judge of discrimination claim.,” Topeka Capital-Journal April 11, 2024. https://news.yahoo.com/transgender-inmate-kansas-womens-prison-085011139.html

7. Ash Olli Kulak, "Locked Away in SEG “For Their Own Protection”: How Congress Gave Federal Corrections the Discretion to House Transgender (Trans) Inmates in Gender-Inappropriate Facilities and Solitary Confinement," Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality: Vol. 6 : Iss. 2 , Article 6. May 22 2018. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=ijlse

8. Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word” Yale Law Journal Vol. 95, 1601. 1985-1986. https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2038586/robert-cover-violence-and-the-word.pdf

9. Sascha Cohen, “How Anti-Sex Work Legislation Is About to Get Worse,” The Nation, September 25, 2023. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/fosta-sesta-avs-bills-sex-work/

10. Jonathan Allen, “New York to deploy 750 National Guard soldiers to check bags on subway,” Rueters, March 8, 2024 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-deploy-750-national-guard-soldiers-check-bags-subway-2024-03-06/

11. Kelly Mena & David Lazar, et al., “Mayor Adams’ budget proposals public safety funding, libray cuts,” NY1 Spectrum News. April 24, 2024 https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/04/24/mayor-eric-adams-budget-proposal-public-safety-funding-education-library-cuts-department-of-cultural-affairs

12. Frazer, S., Saenz, R., Aleman, A., & Laderman, L. (2023). Protected and Served?: 2022 Community Survey of LGBTQ+ People and People Living with HIV’s Experiences with the Criminal Legal System. Lambda Legal and Black and Pink National. Page 16. http://protectedandserved.org/2022- report-full-report

13. Id. at 48.

14. Trans Legislation Tracker, “The rise of anti-trans bills in the U.S.” https://translegislation.com/learn

15. Center for American Progress et al., Unjust: How the Broken Criminal Justice System Fails LGBT People. Page iii. February 2016. https://nbjc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/lgbt-criminal-justice.pdf

16. Id.

17. Id. at 70.

18. Id. at 29.

19. Saenz et al., supra, at 48.

20. Lucas Waldon & Ken Schweneke, “Deadnamed,” ProPublica August 10, 2018. https://www.propublica.org/article/deadnamed-transgender-black-women-murders-jacksonville-police-investigation

21. Kulak, supra at 314.

22. Blake Nemec, “No One Enters Like Them: Health Gender Variance, and the PIC,” Captive Genders ed. Eric A Stanley & Nat Smith. AK Press. 2nd Ed. October 27, 2014. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1849352348. .

23. Julia C. Oprah, “Feminism and the (Trans)gender Entrapment of Gender Nonconforming Prisoners” UCLA Journal of Gender and Law, 18(2) 2012. https://escholarship.org/content/qt3sp664r9/qt3sp664r9.pdf?t=mlqpzu.

24. Paula Rae Witherspoon, “My Story,” Captive Genders ed. Eric A Stanley & Nat Smith. AK Press. 2nd Ed. October 27, 2014. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1849352348.

25. Chesnut & Peirce Supra at 31.

26. Nils Melzer, “United States: Prolonged solitary confinement amounts to psychological torture, says UN expert,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner Press Release, February 28 2020 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/united-states-prolonged-solitary-confinement-amounts-psychological-torture.

27. Nemec Supra. at 95.

28. Michelle C. Potts, “Regulatory Sites: Management Confinement, and HIV/AIDS,” Captive Genders ed. Eric A Stanley & Nat Smith. AK Press. 2nd Ed. October 27, 2014. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1849352348.

29. Chesnut & Peirce Supra at 36-37.

30. Id. at 40.

31. The Associated Press, “By Defining sex, some states are denying transgedner people legal recognition” NBC News February 27, 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/defining-sex-states-are-denying-transgender-people-legal-recognition-rcna140694.

32. Kiara Alfonseca, “Transgender health care, community targeted in new slate ofTexas bills” ABC News November 16, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transgender-health-care-community-targeted-slate-texas-bills/story?id=93347307.

33. Chesnut & Peirce Supra at 8.