Prisoners of Paradox: Ambivalent Trans-affirmation in the Canadian Prison
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.066 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".