Jenny Swift was a trans woman. She should not have died in a male prison
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/transgender-woman-jenny-swift-prison-death
The prison service acknowledged that Jenny Swift was trans – yet her requests to be assigned to the women’s estate were declined.
One must hope that the Ministry of Justice is merely incompetent when it comes to transgender issues. Because the alternative, that what we see is what they intend, is beyond dire. If true it means they, or some subset of they, are in the business of using inhuman and degrading treatment as a mechanism of control. Consider the latest sorry tale: the death of yet another trans woman in custody and the self-serving press spin that has followed.
Last week, the MoJ revealed that in the early hours of Friday 30 December Jenny Swift, a prisoner at HMP Doncaster, was found unresponsive in her cell. CPR was attempted but Swift was pronounced dead half an hour later.
We must now await the independent investigation by the prisons and probation ombudsman: however, clues to what happened have been in the press reports that followed. According to a friend, Swift, who had been transitioning for several years, was taking hormones. The prison service acknowledged that she was trans – yet her requests to be assigned to the women’s estate were declined. Attempts to make Swift wear male clothing were foiled when Swift entered prison naked: once there, a number of prison guards allegedly insisted on addressing her as “mister”.
The trans community is used to the prison service doggedly refusing to consider it might have made a mistake until popular outcry becomes so great that it is impossible to ignore. This happened in the case of Tara Hudson, little more than a year ago. But Hudson was comparatively lucky: there was exceptional press interest; politicians and the wider public were fully engaged.
Since then I have had the “privilege” of access to many such cases: daily humiliation at the hands of prison staff and other prisoners is commonplace, along with denial of appropriate clothing. Rape and physical assault – both the threat and the reality – are all too common: the only “solution” in some cases appears to be to place the trans prisoner on the high-security sex offender wing.
Still, this is surely all in the past. New guidelines for the treatment of trans prisoners state that trans cases should be reviewed within three days of arrival in custody to determine where they would be best placed; individual dignity should be respected; and crucially, except and unless a particular concession is a demonstrable risk to safety and security, it should be permitted.
Too bad, for Swift, that these guidelines only came into effect on 1 January, just days after her death. No doubt we shall hear more from the prison service of this unhappy confluence, and how, had she been sent to prison a few weeks later, all would have been hunky-dory.
One aspect of the story will have sent shivers down the spine of every trans woman reading it: Swift’s friend says the hormones she was taking were abruptly withdrawn when she entered the prison system. That is beyond cruel. Whether hormones have been prescribed or obtained via the internet, there are good reasons never to do this, including major life-threatening physiological effects, as well as serious psychological ones, including mood swings, and severe depression.
Trans women know all about how this feels: anyone who has undergone gender confirmation surgery will have come off hormones about four to six weeks prior to the operation and is usually required to stay off for four weeks afterwards. For me, this was one of the bleakest periods of my life. Two weeks in, I hit a wall of misery and darkness such as I had never experienced before. Apparently though, my own experience was merely “average”: others have it far worse; almost no one comes through with blithe indifference.
This is hardly surprising: once a body adapts to a particular hormone regime, coming down from it is akin to a mini-menopause. All of the usual symptoms plus, in a prison setting, the uncertainty of when one will ever get back on hormones.
Yet this, allegedly, and all too believably, is what the prison service coldly and knowingly inflicts.
Would the prison service care to comment on this? Apparently not: asked a direct question about the issue, it preferred to take refuge in yet more pieties about guidelines and which estate trans prisoners are lodged in. Until it does provide answers, the awful conclusion remains: that this was not just accident, but policy.
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