This paper analyses how the prison system in England and Wales transitioned from sex to gender, from the 1990s to the 2010s. It traces the succession of criteria for allocating males to women’s prisons: first genital surgery, then legal sex, and finally gender identity. These changes can be explained by two distinct forces. The first was the expansion of human rights in the spheres of imprisonment and healthcare, largely through legal decisions. The second force can be called queer theory, which inspired activists and eventually shaped media coverage. Sustained pressure on the government led in 2016 to regulations which facilitated the transfer of males to the women’s estate. Predictably, one sexually assaulted female inmates. The paper concludes with this case, which illuminates the consequences of putting queer theory in to practice.
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Michael Biggs (2020) studied this question.