Prisoners of Paradox: Ambivalent Trans-affirmation in the Canadian Prison

Based on twenty-four months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, this dissertation traces the conditions of possibility of recent Canadian trans correctional reforms and explores the outcome of their early implementation. Drawing from insights in legal and medical anthropology, critical criminology, and trans studies, it argues these reforms emerged from a wider shift through which trans subjectivity transitioned from being a pathological medical condition to becoming a self-determined, injury-based legal category. In the pre-reform era, Canadian correctional authorities cited pathologizing norms in trans medicine and security concerns in ‘gender-responsive’ women’s institutions to prohibit the placement of ‘pre-operative’ trans people in identity-concordant facilities. From the 1990s onward, trans advocates and their allies challenged the model of pathologization, asking for the inclusion of a broader range of gender-variant persons and for their entitlement to ‘self-determine’ their access to medical care and legal recognition. Correctional reforms were prompted by stories that various actors emploted about trans prisoners’ suffering, which were recuperable within a rights-based framework that posits that injury can be remedied through legal protections and accommodations. This ethnography argues that the quest for rights foreclosed more transformative projects for social change, also requiring advocates to elevate specific stories and silence others. Canada’s reforms thereby constrained trans personhood to a category of ‘virtuous victimhood’, which occluded that trans prisoners are, fundamentally, paradoxical figures: at once ‘victims’ and ‘offenders’. This would, in turn, have ambivalent consequences in the everyday of prison life, where self-determination’s inclusive and liberatory aspirations were in a chronic tension with correctional institutions’ punitive and rehabilitative logics. This dissertation suggests that the ambivalences that emerged through Canada’s trans prison reforms are not anomalies but, rather, that they provide a window to reflect on the ambivalent nature of Canada’s regime of governance, through which inclusion and exclusion are not polar opposites but co-constitutive potentialities. Following from other anthropologists’ concerns with how to write about suffering without producing totalizing, overdetermined narratives, this dissertation also considers what the case of trans prisoners demands of ethnographic writing and what it suggests about the (mis)uses of storytelling in the everyday pursuit of social change.

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