"I Know the Degradation, the Humiliation around Being Incarcerated and Ostracized, and Marginalized, and Sexualized"

"I Know the Degradation, the Humiliation around Being Incarcerated and Ostracized, and Marginalized, and Sexualized"

Drawing upon interviews with Black American and First Nations Australian trans women who have been incarcerated in male sex-segregated prisons and jails, this chapter documents Black American and First Nations Australian trans women’s pathways to incarceration as well as incarceration experiences. We seek to situate these lived experiences within ingrained and intersecting systems of domination and oppression that operate in two global contexts and function to criminalize trans women, especially those trans women holding multiple minoritized identities, including structural racism, settler colonialism, cissexism, and transphobia. We seek to demonstrate how these forces operate within and beyond the prison walls in the United States and Australia to oppress – and hold captive – racial and ethnic minority trans women. We respectfully acknowledge the scholarship of Black and other racial and ethnic minority and indigenous transgender scholars, activists, and prison abolitionists (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991; McDonald, 2015; Lydon et al., 2015; Wesp et al., 2019), and hope this chapter can complement existing work by demonstrating how forces of oppression operate – and with stark similarity across two nations with histories of systemic racism and settler colonialism – to marginalize and criminalize Black American and First Nations Australian trans women.

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