Chapter 11: Violence and Race in Transgender Prisons in California PDF

he (pink) elephant in the roomThe structure and experience of race and violence in the lives of transgender prisoners in California Jennifer Sumner, Lori Sexton, Valerie Jenness and Cheryl L. Maxson Introduction In the past few decades, there has been a move in research along two parallel lines:...

he (pink) elephant in the roomThe structure and experience of race and violence in the lives of transgender prisoners in California Jennifer Sumner, Lori Sexton, Valerie Jenness and Cheryl L. Maxson Introduction In the past few decades, there has been a move in research along two parallel lines: on transgender people and on intersectionality. In Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, David Valentine (2007: 4) argues that the term "transgender" emerged in the early 1990s and came to be understood as "a collective category of identity which incorporates a diverse array of male-and female-bodied gender variant people who had previously been understood as distinct kinds of persons." At about the same time, Patricia Hill Collins' (1990) book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw's (1991) article, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color," served as a catalyst for the now-institutionalized commitment across the social sciences and humanities to focus analytic attention on how various axes of differentiation form intersectionalities that are informed by and shape systems of inequality. These parallel developments---the growing recognition of "transgender" as a social type and the study of intersectionalities---direct attention to the varying ways in which race, class, and gender (as well as other axes of social differentiation, such as sexuality) are manifest in the lives of those who embrace identities and present bodies that challenge, if not upend, a binary sex/gender system. The diversity found within the transgender population is beyond dispute. Participants in Girshick's (2008: 10) study, aptly titled Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men, identified as: male-to-female transsexual (not necessarily living as such full-time, and individuals at various stages of transition); female-to-male transsexual (not necessarily living as such full-time, and individuals at various stages of transition); male cross-dresser; female (including transsexuals and non-transsexuals); male (including transsexual and nontranssexuals); transgender (along with other identities); butch (including labels of butch lesbian, stone butch, dyke, soft butch, and masculine woman); intersex; genderqueer; neutrois; transgender (as a single identity); femme; woman-born transsexual; androgyne male; femme androgyne; ungendered; bigendered; transman; gender variant; trans male performing butch; trans; femme dyke or transdyke; tranny fag; tranny; or trans. In other words, transgender is a broad, socially recognized category in which many diverse types of people locate themselves. Equally important for our purposes here, as a disproportionately poor and socially marginalized group transgender people can be found in an array of carceral environments, including jails, prisons, and other types of detention facilities (Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007). Transgender prisoners in the U.S. are housed in facilities that generally presume one---and only one---type of gendered being; for the most part, there are prisons for men and there are prisons for women. Both types of prisons are home to a disproportionate number of people of color and people who occupy the poor end of the class structure. The same holds true for transgender prisoners (Sexton, Jenness, and Sumner 2010; Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007). In fact, when examined along the lines of employment, marital status, mental health, substance abuse, HIV status, homelessness, sex work, and victimization, transgender prisoners constitute a particularly marginalized and vulnerable population in prison (Sexton et al. 2010). This state of affairs raises many questions about the status of transgender prisoners; the risks they face inside prison; the ability of state officials to house transgender people in safe, secure, humane, and constitutional carceral environments; and the so-called collateral consequences of being imprisoned. It also raises questions about how race, class, and gender operate in the lives of transgender prisoners. In this chapter, we draw on original data collected across two large-scale prison studies to expand upon our previous analyses of transgender prisoners in California prisons by bringing race---what has been called "the elephant in the room"1---more fully into view. In previous work, we have used these studies to examine this population in terms of the diversity of people who comprise it (e.g., Jenness, Sexton, and Sumner 2011; Jenness, Sumner, Sexton, and Alamillo-Luchese 2014), the workings of gender as transgender prisoners pursue "gender authenticity" in prisons for men among the larger inmate culture (Jenness and Fenstermaker 2014), the multiple marginalities experienced by transgender prisoners (Sexton et al. 2010), and the shortcomings of current policy approaches to housing and managing transgender inmates (e.g., Sumner and Jenness 2014). Thus far, however, published work from these studies has largely focused on gender and sexuality, while ignoring race and racialization as important analytic considerations. As an empirical window through which race can be seen interacting with gender and sexuality, we focus on the empirical parameters of violence to reveal a few ways in which the lives of transgender prisoners are and, equally important, are not racialized. We do so because the threat and occurrence of violence loom large in inmates' decision-making about how to act and what to say; for decades violence in prison has provided research with a focal point to understand larger issues of inmate culture;2 and from an institutional standpoint, the prevention of violence is a centerpiece to operational goals and missions (Sumner and Jenness 2014). Thus, official decision-making about which policies to develop and practices to implement is informed by real and anticipated violence in prison. Threatened and realized violence structures prison life, while a focus on violent incidents allows us to see that structure in action. To set the stage for our empirical analysis, in the next section we acknowledge that prisons are gendered and classed institutions and draw on a well-established literature to provide an overview of prisons as racialized and race-making institutions. Thereafter, we provide a brief summary of the studies from which our original empirical analysis of violence in the lives of transgender prisoners is drawn. Then we present select findings on the racialization of violence among transgender prisoners, with a focus on select parameters of violent incidents and the structure of housing and relationships. We conclude with a nuanced discussion of the way in which intersectionalities permeate the lives of transgender prisoners. Prisons as gendered, classed, and racialized institutions Prisons as gendered Prisons are, without a doubt, gendered, classed, and racialized institutions. With regard to gender, Britton (2003: 3) explained in her book At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as a Gendered Organization: Ideas about gender have shaped prisons, literally and figuratively, from their very first appearance as institutions of social control. Nineteenth-century reformers made women's presumed inherent difference from men the primary basis of their case for separate institutions for women, run exclusively by female staff. In a similar way, ideas about masculinity played a role in the architecture and styles of discipline advocated in early men's prisons. One of the most basic underlying assumptions of prison operations is that there are two types of people---males and females---and that fact looms large. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, with few exceptions, sex segregation in prison was arguably the least contested prison policy/practice across geographical region, local government, prison level, and inmate population. In short, the institutional manifestation of the culture's sex/gender binary is taken for granted, yet defines prison existence in virtually every aspect. Prisons as classed Just as prisons are sex-segregated institutions, so too are they home to a disproportionate number of offenders from low-income, marginalized, urban communities (Wakefield and Uggen 2010). This social fact is consistent with the reproduction of socioecowestern nomic inequalities at each stage of criminal justice system processing---from arrest through sentencing and post-release (Wheelock and Uggen 2008). As Wacquant (2010) has concluded: "This cumulative targeting has led to the hyperincarceration of one particular category, lower-class African American men trapped in the crumbling ghetto, while leaving the rest of society---including, most remarkably, middle- and upper-class African Americans---practically untouched" (p. 78, original emphasis). From a socioeconomic point of view, prisoners both import disadvantage (in the form of low socioeconomic status) into prison with them and accumulate more disadvantage in the form of their limited ability to earn a fair or reasonable wage and an inability to significantly improve their living conditions.3 Upon release, they face the consequences of being "marked" as a convicted felon (Pager 2007), which in turn diminishes employment and attendant income earning opportunities. This cycle of class disadvantage on the front end and limited opportunities for upward mobility on the back end ensures that prisons can easily be seen as classed institutions. Simply put, they draw on and reproduce a class structure marked by considerable economic inequality. Prisons as racialized A well-established literature also reveals that prisons are organized around race and that processes of racialization structure prison life, especially in terms of demographics and identity, inmate culture, institutional processing, and the collateral consequences of imprisonment. When we began to collect data to study sexual assault in California prisons in 2006, there were 162,083 adult prisoners incarcerated in California's thirty-three state prisons, 119,153 of whom met the eligibility criteria for our study.4 Official data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) revealed that 39.1 percent of this subset of prisoners were Hispanic, 25.5 percent were White, 29.6 percent were Black, 1.2 percent were Asian, and 4.6 percent were officially designated "other" (see Table 2 in Jenness, Maxson, Matsuda, and Sumner 2007). Moving beyond official designations, California prisoners in prisons for men often embrace self-classifications that differ from CDCR's official classification scheme for race/ethnicity. As Calavita and Jenness (2013: 62) reported in their recent study of the inmate grievance system in California, based on 120 interviews with randomly selected prisoners from three California prisons: \[M\]any of those officially classified as "Hispanic" self-identified as "Mexican," regardless of how many generations they and their families had been U.S. residents or citizens. Conversely, the CDCR sometimes classified men as "Mexican" when they told us they were "Hispanic," or in one case "Hispanic/white." Six of the 37 men officially classified as "black" self-identified as "African American." One man who the CDCR classified as "Black" said he was "Cuban." In the four cases in which people told us they were of mixed backgrounds---"Indonesian/Mexican," "Mexican and Cuban," "African American/Puerto Rican," and "Korean/black"---the CDCR classified them as "Hispanic," "Mexican," "black," and "black," respectively. One person who said he was "Native American/Pima" was classified by the CDCR as "Hispanic." Interestingly, the category that remained most consistent across CDCR classification and self-identity was "white." The only exception to this was an individual who was officially classified as "white" but who referred to himself as "European," followed by the statement, "It doesn't matter---whatever they normally do, White, Caucasian, European---it's just my ancestry"(\#117). Beyond the issue of different classification categories, we are sensitive to the fluid and contingent nature of racial identification, and it must be stressed that these self-descriptors may reflect this moment in time and the prison context. Saperstein and Penner's (2010) interesting work on the effects of incarceration on racial identity provides further support for the way in which identity is racialized in carceral settings. Their analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth led them to conclude "that respondents who have been incarcerated are more likely to identify and be seen as black, and less likely to identify and be seen as white, regardless of how they were perceived or identified previously" (Saperstein and Penner 2010: 92). Extrapolating from this work, prisons for men not only differentially house people of color; arguably they could be producing people of color. Moving beyond demographics, decades of research have documented that race has historically been a prominent aspect of inmate life (Jacobs 1979; Wacquant 2001). In their now classic work, Irwin and Cressey (1962) argued that prison culture was organized around preexisting inmate identities, including race identities that were imported into prison. This was evident, Jacobs (1979: 1) argued, through the grouping of inmates around racial/ethnic lines in Stateville Penitentiary: "Since the late 1950s race relations have precipitated enormous changes in prisoner subcultures and in prison organization." Further, he described: "Blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and members of other racial minorities now constitute the majority of American prisoners. Behind the walls, white, black and Spanish-speaking inmates exist in separate conflict-ridden worlds" (Jacobs 1979: 1). Research in California prisons reveals the multitude of ways that race serves as the basis for stratification in prison and racializes prison life (Goodman 2008; Lindsey 2009). Goodman's (2008) ethnographic work in California's prison reception centers reveals that race is attended to by inmates and CDCR staff alike from the moment prisoners enter the prison (i.e., the reception center); and it quickly becomes easily recognizable as a central organizing principle of prison life. He describes how the correctional staff and administration are similarly organized around race in their development and deployment of intake housing forms that create and codify racial categories. Using these forms as their guide, correctional officers work with inmates to arrive at what Goodman (2008) refers to as a "negotiated settlement" that is consequential for prisoners' individual racial/ethnic identities and their subsequent race-based housing placement.5 After observing hundreds of interactions between CDCR officials and prisoners coming into the reception center, Goodman concludes: "The interactions analyzed in this study demonstrate that prisons are not just a product of a racialized society (as scholars such as Wacquant have made abundantly clear). They are also places in which 'race' is made and remade" (Goodman 2008: 763; see also Lindsey 2009). One result, as reported by Lindsey (2009), is that 69 percent of the sample of prisoners in her study of racial integration in California prisons indicated that they would not be willing to cell with someone from a different race in California's largely racially segregated prisons for men. The racially segregated nature of California's prisons for men was recently showcased in an online public interest news source that questioned: "Are California Prisons Punishing Inmates Based on Race?" (Thompson 2013). In this piece, the author describes a practice in California prisons that includes posting colored signs above the doors of cells, with each color indicating a particular racial or ethnic group (Black, White, Hispanic, and all else). Thompson (2013) explains the process by which prison officials restrict inmates' movement based on their membership in the same racial group as inmates who have recently been involved in violence. This practice is currently under legal scrutiny. Outside the racialized workings of prison, the collateral consequences of incarceration have differentially affected men of color from poor urban communities and served to reinforce existing stratification systems (Wakefield and Uggen 2010). For example, the consequences of incarceration for future employment (Pager 2007), voting rights (Manza and Uggen 2008), and access to housing and other such necessities of life (Alexander and Meshelemiah 2010) have differentially negatively impacted people of color. Accordingly, Alexander (2010) has called this "the new Jim Crow" and Wacquant (2010: 74) has pointed out that this so-called "mass incarceration" is more accurately the "hyperincarceration" of "(sub) proletarian African American men from the imploding ghetto." Wacquant (2001) goes further to argue that the prison, like slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the urban ghetto, has become a "race making" institution. Clearly, then, prisons are gendered, classed, and raced institutions that play a key role in incarceration becoming an increasingly powerful force for reproducing social inequalities. To use Wakefield and Uggen's (2010) phrase, they are stratifying institutions. California prisons in particular have a long and visible history of being organized around gender, class, and race, with visible consequences for prisoners. However, what is considerably less visible is the intersection between race, violence, and gender and sexuality for transgender prisoners. It is in this context that we now turn to the data used for our analysis of violence involving transgender prisoners in California prisons. Data sources The data presented in this chapter derive from two large-scale projects that have been described in detail elsewhere (Jenness et al. 2011; Jenness 2011). Both projects were funded to examine the prevalence and characteristics of sexual victimization among inmates in California prisons for men and both projects collected data on non-sexual violence as well. Study 1 included a random sample of inmates in six prisons (n = 322 inmates; n = 499 total reported incidents of violent victimization) and a small purposive sample of transgender inmates in one prison (n = 39 inmates; n = 128 incidents of violent victimization reported) interviewed in 2006. In this chapter, the findings for non-sexual violent victimization exclude those considered to be riots from the participants' point of view (n = 108) leaving a total of 355 incidents.6 Study 2 focused on the transgender population in 27 California prisons for men (n = 315 inmates; n = 198 reported incidents of violent victimization) with interviews conducted in 2008 (Jenness et al. 2011). In both studies, systematic data were collected through face-to-face interviews with prisoners. Interviewers used questionnaires that included both closed-ended and open-ended questions about prison life, housing arrangements, daily activities, and violence and victimization. Study 2 also included data collection on the composition of the transgender population in housing units and the contours of transgender prisoners' physical and social/interactional environments (including interpersonal relationships). In addition, official individual-level data were collected for all study participants in both studies as well as the larger population of inmates for comparative purposes (e.g., commitment offense and classification level). The empirical analyses presented below draw on these data, including both existing published findings and original analyses from both studies. Our analytic focus is on how transgender prisoners compare to their counterparts in California prisons in terms of their demographics, prevalence of sexual and non-sexual violence, racial/ethnic characteristics of victims and perpetrators in violent incidents, and perceptions of why violence occurs. In addition, we examine the role that housing and relationship structures play in the landscape of violence against transgender prisoners in California prisons. Findings Demographics, diversity, and differential location in prison As reported elsewhere, transgender inmates are distinguishable from the larger population of inmates in California's prisons for adult men in terms of age, with transgender inmates more represented in the middle ages (36--45); race/ethnicity, with transgender inmates disproportionately white and black; commitment offense, with transgender inmates disproportionately admitted to prison for crimes against property; custody level, with transgender inmates disproportionately classified as Level 3 (close security) and Level 4 (maximum security); sex offender status, with transgender inmates more frequently classified as sex offenders; gang status, with transgender inmates less frequently identified as gang members; and mental health status, with transgender inmates more often classified as having mental health concerns (Sexton et al. 2010). Further distinguishing transgender prisoners from their counterparts in prison is that they report a wide range of gender identities and presentations as well as sexual orientations and sexual attractions (Jenness et al. 2007; Jenness et al. 2014). These demographic and identity factors, coupled with their (often immediately visible) status as "the ladies among men" (Jenness 2011), differentially situate them in opportunity structures for violence. As Nikkas Alamillo-Luchese, an incarcerated transgender woman and our collaborator on a published chapter that speaks to the diversity found in the transgender population, wrote: "We are a culture of transgenders who are victimized, harassed and treated with prejudiced double-standards" (Jenness et al. 2014: 16). As we shall see, in the process the racialization of violence is rendered visible in some respects and invisible in other respects. The parameters of violence in the lives of transgender prisoners Findings from Study 1 reveal that transgender prisoners are considerably more vulnerable to assault---sexual or otherwise---in prison than are a randomly selected sample of prisoners. In Study 1, more than a third (37.1 percent) of the randomly selected prisoners reported never being involved in violence while in a California prison; in contrast, only 13.2 percent of transgender prisoners reported never being involved in violence while in a California prison (see Table 4 in Jenness et al. 2007). This threefold difference is overshadowed by another vulnerability factor: sexual assault is thirteen times more prevalent among transgender inmates, with 59 percent reporting sexual assaults in prison (Jenness et al. 2007; see also Jenness et al. 2011). Focusing on rape as a particular type of sexual assault, two different measures of rape---one that relies on the inmates' own assessment of incidents and one that relies on a definition of rape as "oral or anal penetration by force or threat of force"---reveals that 2 percent and 3 percent, respectively, of randomly sampled inmates described at least one occurrence of rape, as did 41 percent and 50 percent, respectively, of the transgender sample of inmates (Jenness et al. 2007). Table 11.1 Concordance of race/ethnicity between perpetrators and victims of violent incidents reported by a random sample of prisoners and the transgender prisoner population \* Source: Jenness, Valerie, Cheryl L. Maxson, Kristy N. Matsuda, and Jennifer Sumner. 2007. Violence in California Correctional Facilities: An Empirical Examination of Sexual Assault. Report to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Irvine, CA: University of California, Irvine. Note: †Riots were excluded from the analyses. As Table 11.1 reveals, a key racial difference is rendered visible in reported incidents of victimization across these two studies. Most notably, both non-sexual and sexual incidents experienced by a random sample of prisoners were most likely to be intraracial. In sharp contrast, transgender prisoners were more likely to experience both sexual and non-sexual victimization that is interracial. This finding suggests that the contours of violence are differentially racialized for transgender inmates. Although our data are not sufficiently granulated to empirically delineate why this racialized distinction emerges, the extant prison literature coupled with ethnographic observations made during data collection in prison and among transgender prisoners suggests a reasonable hypothesis: those in the random sample of inmates are more likely to interact with others of their own race, be guided by race-specific politics, and have experiences constrained by race relations. In contrast, transgender inmates may be less constrained by racial politics, and thus have more opportunity to interact and experience conflict with inmates of different races. We hypothesize that transgender prisoners interact more frequently with prisoners who do not share their racial/ethnic classification or identification, and therefore their opportunity for victimization across racial/ethnic groups is greater. Counterfactually, interracial victimization cannot occur to the degree that racial segregation is complete. This hypothesis is supported by a consideration of the structure of housing for transgender prisoners compared to their counterparts in California prisons. Available evidence suggests that, in general, California prisons are racially segregated at the cell level, despite recent efforts to achieve a modicum of in-cell integration (Goodman 2008; Lindsey 2009). However, findings from Study 2 regarding housing location suggest that transgender inmates, by and large, are being housed according to characteristics of need and/or risk, rather than racial categorization. Specifically, 75 percent of the transgender prisoners in Study 2 were housed in a specialized housing unit (e.g., medical, mental health, sensitive needs yard (SNY), or administrative-segregation) at the time of data collection (Jenness et al. 2011). Those housed in SNYs were considered to belong to one of numerous vulnerable populations, including informants, former gang members, sex offenders, and, as presented here, transgender inmates. Related, at the time we collected data for Study 2, nearly one third (32.7 percent) of the transgender prisoners were housed in only three prisons, creating substantial concentrations of transgender prisoners (Jenness et al. 2011).7 The comparatively large percentage of transgender inmates housed in specialized units or clustered together with other similarly situated inmates suggests that non-race characteristics trump what Goodman (2008) has shown to be the primary consideration for housing placement: race (cf. Lindsey 2009). For transgender inmates, gender and/or sexual identity seemingly prevail in the housing placement decisions, especially in the instances in which transgender inmates are housed in SNYs, mental health units, or administrative segregation as a result of classification as it relates to these aspects of identity. SNYs, for example, play a role in the devaluation of race-based housing for transgender inmates in California prisons because, in order to be effective, they presumably require a willingness to reject prison politics, including racial politics. Lindsey (2009: 8) confirms this, indicating that, in contrast to the mainline population, "the SNY inmates were already sleeping on integrated bunks, and, of those interviewed, no one seemed to mind." In addition, a reliance on DSM-IV diagnoses by correctional departments (see Sumner and Jenness 2014) may result in disproportionate placement in mental health housing units. Also, it is not uncommon for transgender inmates and other vulnerable populations to be housed in isolation (or administrative segregation) as a means of protective custody. These structural realities related to housing assignments diminish the centrality of race in the management of transgender prisoners, effectively recognizing gender and/or sexual identity as the master status operational for transgender prisoners. It is within this structure that the interracial violence rather than intraracial violence occurs more frequently among transgender prisoners than among their counterparts (see Table 11.1). A second characteristic of violent incidents---relational distance between victims and perpetrators---provides further insight into the configuration of violence between prisoners, transgender and otherwise. In the random sample of inmates, violence is evident between parties with varying degrees of familiarity (from "stranger" to "known well") (Jenness et al. 2007). In contrast, the relational distance between transgender prisoners and those who assault them is skewed toward familiarity. As reported in summary terms in Table 11.2, transgender inmates were more likely to report a closer relational distance with the perpetrator of the incident than were inmates in the random sample. This relationship holds for both nonsexual and sexual incidents of violence, but is particularly stark with regard to sexual assault. For the random sample inmates there is a fairly even distribution along the continuum of relational distance wherein the perpetrators are "all or mostly strangers" (25.8 percent), "all or mostly \[people who are\] identifiable" (22.6 percent), "all or mostly acquaintances" (25.8 percent), and "all or mostly known well" (25.8 percent) (Jenness et al. 2007). However, in more than 70 percent of the sexual incidents reported by transgender inmates, the perpetrators are known well or are an acquaintance of the victim, evidencing a higher degree of familiarity than with regard to violence experienced by random sample inmates. These findings related to relational distance align with another significant finding that speaks to relationships more generally. Namely, Study 2 reveals that transgender prisoners who are involved in marriage-like relationships while incarcerated are significantly more likely to have experienced sexual and non-sexual victimization than those who were not (Jenness et al. 2011). Specifically, 42 percent of transgender inmates who told interviewers they were in a marriage-like relationship with another inmate while in their current housing unit had experienced sexual victimization, as compared to 23.1 percent of those who reported no such relationships. The corresponding figures for non-sexual assault are 27.5 percent of inmates in a marriage-like relationship compared to 14.9 percent of those not in such relationships. This pattern is even stronger when considering sexual relationships, which further increase one's likelihood of victimization. Table 11.2 Relational distance between perpetrators and victims of violent incidents reported by a random sample of prisoners and the transgender prisoner population \* Source: Jenness, Valerie, Cheryl L. Maxson, Kristy N. Matsuda, and Jennifer Sumner. 2007. Violence in California Correctional Facilities: An Empirical Examination of Sexual Assault. Report to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Irvine, CA: University of California, Irvine. Notes: †Riots were excluded from the analyses. ‡Perpetrators "known" to the victim include those "known well" and "acquaintances." The picture that is emerging here sheds light on two main patterns: compared to their counterparts in prison, transgender prisoners likely associate with more racially/ethnically diverse prisoners, and the probability of physical and sexual assault increases for those transgender prisoners who engage in sexual and marriage-like relationships with other prisoners. Qualitatively, inmates' narratives of violent incidents and the relationships that provide the context in which they occur offer support for this emergent picture. Quite often, we heard about violent incidents that occurred when social and intimate relationships went awry for one reason or another, often related to jealousy. For example, as one transgender prisoner explained: My partner/lover and I got into a quarrel. He put his hand on me and we ended up fighting. He was jealous because... I don't like to go with someone who's married. He met someone else and \[I\] wanted to call it off and he wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. These kinds of incidents, which are all too familiar to transgender prisoners, reveal the link between intimate relationships and violence for transgender prisoners, which is made all the more complicated in light of findings advanced by Jenness and Fenstermaker (2014). Drawing on rich qualitative data, they detail how transgender prisoners place a primacy on displays of femininity and the attention of "real men" to affirm them as women: We focus on the pursuit of the "real deal" to refer to the complicated dynamic whereby transgender prisoners claim and assert their femininity in prison---a hegemonically defined hypermasculine and heteronormative environment with an abundance of alpha males, sexism, and violence. By their own account, transgender prisoners assert themselves with well-understood motivations, patterned manifestations, and an understanding of very real consequences for themselves and others. (Jenness and Fenstermaker 2014: 14) Jenness and Fenstermaker (2014) use the term "gender authenticity" to refer to the pursuit of full recognition, or what some transgender prisoners refer to as the "real deal" or being a "real girl." The manifest desire to be taken as feminine, and thus female, prompts and sustains a commitment to "act like a lady" and sets the stage for a playful and serious competition among transgender prisoners for the attention and affection of "real men" in prison. The importance of the dynamics described by Jenness and Fenstermaker (2014) aids in interpreting the findings presented in Table 11.3, which reveal the prominence of relational aspects of violence and the simultaneous erasure of racialized meanings at the interactional, rather than structural, level. Table 11.3 presents the most frequent explanations for violence that emerge in response to asking prisoners what violent incidents were about.8 This question provided respondents with an opportunity to explain how they make sense of violent incidents they reported. Interestingly, more than half of the incidents of sexual violence reported by both groups were, according to them, simply about "sex." Likewise, they agreed that "disrespect" is one of the top two reasons that explain non-sexual violence, while power/control appears on three out of the four top five lists. Table 11.3 Explanations for violent incidents1 report by a random sample of prisoners and the transgender prisoner population in California prisons for men \* Source: Jenness, Valerie, Cheryl L. Maxson, Kristy N. Matsuda, and Jennifer Sumner. 2007. Violence in California Correctional Facilities: An Empirical Examination of Sexual Assault. Report to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Irvine, CA: University of California, Irvine. Notes: † Riots were excluded from the analyses. 1 The top five categories here represent substantive responses to the question "What was this incident \[most\] about?" In study 1, including the random sample, the question did not include the word "most." The residual coding category ("other") or multiple categories are excluded from these rankings. 2 The category "Sex" includes explanations of sex, physical attraction, and flirting. 3 The category "Relationships" includes explanations of relationships, love, companionship, and romantic interest. 4 The category "Being TG/gay" includes explanations of being targeted for violence because of the victim's perceived status as transgender or gay. This includes bias-motivated violence as well as perceptions that the victim had an "open door policy" for sex due to these statuses. 5 The category "Transactional" includes explanations of the exchange of sex for money, goods, protection, and special consideration/treatment. The differences in explanations for violence given by the two groups of prisoners are equally informative. Specifically, transgender inmates more often explain violent incidents as a function of gender and interpersonal relationships than do inmates in the random sample. Related, when transgender respondents were asked in Study 2, "When prison violence between only transgender inmates occurs, what is it usually about?" over half of all respondents (51.8 percent) indicated that it is usually about relationships or men. Incident narratives from Study 2 reveal that jealousy, often related to competition for the attention of the men and/or other aspects of physical attractiveness in general, is the most commonly cited explanation for what non-sexual incidents experienced by transgender prisoners are about. Notably, for the transgender population, "sex" is offered as the reason for 10.3 percent of non-sexual incidents of violence; however, "sex" does not make the list of top five reasons for nonsexual violence given by those in the random sample of prisoners. Also revealed in Table 11.3, race is rendered invisible as a reason for both non-sexual and sexual violence incidents reported by transgender prisoners. In fact, while race was indicated as the reason for 15.5 percent (n = 54)9 incidents in the random sample (only one of which is a sexual incident), it was provided as the reason the incident was "most" about less than 1 percent of the time (0.5 percent; n = 1) among the transgender population. This discrepancy increases if the issue of gangs is included. Prior research indicates that prison gangs are highly racialized (see Winterdyk and Ruddell 2010). Thus, when race and gang categories are combined, 21.8 percent of incidents reported by the random sample are "about race/gangs" and now 1 percent is about race/gangs for transgender inmates. This result echoes findings in studies of prisons for women in California---a notable lack of significance of race in the management of inmate culture (Owen 1998). Indeed, interpersonal relationships---friendships, family-like, and romantic---are documented to be more prominent in prison culture for women as well (e.g., Owen 1998). The totality of findings presented above reveals ways in which race is rendered visible as a structural fact of transgender prisoners' lives and invisible as a product of sense-making about violence in the lives of transgender prisoners. Paradoxically, on the one hand, transgender prisoners report considerably more interracial violence than other prisoners; this is a structural fact. On the other hand, they assign race considerably less meaning as they make attributions of cause to the violence they experience; this is product of sense-making on the part of transgender prisoners. In the next section we address this paradox revealed by our empirical findings. Discussion and conclusion As we were completing this chapter, one of the authors received a letter from a transgender prisoner in a California prison in which the prisoner explained, in simple terms: "race don't really matter among us transgender inmates of color in a California prison." Revealing words, to be sure. In sharp contrast, when an African American transgender woman on parole was a guest speaker in a class taught by one of the coauthors of this chapter, she went to the podium and (re) introduced herself by saying "I'm a Black transgender woman." It was revealing that her introduction foregrounded her racial-ethnic identity in addition to her transgender identity, given that only the latter was the focus of the day's class. The respective absence and presence of race in these expressions and the context in which they took form is telling. These moments, as well as the findings presented in this chapter, remind us that interactional and institutional contexts shape whether and how intersections between race, class, and gender---as well as other axes of differentiation---take shape and structure inequalities and attendant life chances. As West and Fenstermaker (1995: 30) explain: First, and perhaps most important, conceiving of these as ongoing accomplishments means that we cannot determine their relevance to social action apart from the context in which they are accomplished (Fenstermaker, West, and Zimmerman, 1991; West and Fenstermaker, 1993). While sex category, race category and class category are potentially omnirelevant to social life, individuals inhabit many different identities, and these may be stressed or muted, depending on the situation. How these categories are stressed and muted in different contexts is, of course, an empirical question to be interrogated by data rather than a conclusion to be assumed by common sense or sociological convention. As revealed in other empirical work derived from the larger research projects described in this chapter, within the formal institutionalized setting of the prison and the looming hypermasculine inmate culture, transgender prisoners exist and manage life in a way that accentuates gender and sexuality (Jenness and Fenstermaker 2014). In particular, transgender prisoners talk about managing prison life, including the use of violence, in ways that reveal the centrality of gender and sexuality. As a result, race and racialization are easily rendered comparatively invisible when they make sense of---and account for---the cause of violence in their lives in prison.10 In this chapter, however, the analysis of select dimensions of violence reveals that the structure of violence involving transgender prisoners is racialized even as they experience it and make sense of it in decidedly non-racial terms. With regard to the former, race is rendered visible as an organizing feature by virtue of the finding that transgender inmates are more often victimized by a perpetrator of a different racial/ethnic group. In sharp contrast, transgender prisoners do not imbue violent incidents with racial meaning to the degree one would expect in light of a vast literature that reveals myriad ways in which prisons are race-based, racialized, and race-making institutions. On the one hand, it is surprising that race is largely absent in their explanations of violence. On the other hand, it is understandable in light of the centrality of gender and sexuality in their lives in prison. This discordance between the structure of race and the experience of race as both relate to violence reported by transgender prisoners is revealing. First and foremost, it reveals that the threads of intersectionality are not of equal weight, much less equal consequence, in the lives of transgender women prisoners in men's prisons. They are, sociologically speaking, context dependent and interactionally achieved social facts of prison life for transgender prisoners. Just as the CDCR often privileges gendered and sexualized vulnerabilities over race in terms of classification decisions and outcomes for transgender prisoners, so too do transgender prisoners privilege the gendered landscape of their lives over the racialized context of the prison in which they live when making sense of the violence they endure.