Stories of 0s: Transgender Women, Monstrous Bodies, and the Canadian Prison System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prisons regulate identities and what rights get recognized and protected in a prison setting. Gender is a core element of identity that is policed by the prison system and by the law that governs prisons. Focusing on developments within Canadian transgender jurisprudence, this paper explores how prisoners’ bodies that do not conform to a strict gender binary are defined as inhuman. By critically assessing the prison system and prison policy, this essay demonstrates how Canadian law has often failed to address the needs and lived experiences of transgender women in their interactions with the penal system. As case law demonstrates, the rights of cisgender women—that is, women whose gender and anatomy have aligned since birth—tend to trump the rights of transgender women. Implicit in this tendency is a judgment as to whom the law will recognize as ‘real.’ This paper challenges the logic of protecting women deemed authentic when such protection comes at the expense of transgender women. To that end, the pivotal cases of Kavanagh v Canada (Attorney General) and Forrester v Peel (Regional Municipality) Police Services Board are examined. These cases show how the law’s reliance on genitals as the primary signifier of gender contributes to the dehumanization of the transgender subject in a prison setting. In order to query this logic of genitocentrism, this paper also examines developments in transgender jurisprudence outside the prison context. It concludes with an analysis of XY v Ontario (Minister of Government and Consumer Services) in order to track the movement of Canadian law away from a transphobia that allows body parts to speak for individuals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.073 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".