(En)gendering Risk and the Paradox of Carceral Inclusivity: Making Up Transgender Prisoners in Ontario Correctional Policy

Mobilizing feminist theory in tandem with Ian Hacking’s ‘making up people’ framework, this paper examines the gendered logics that are foundational to the ways in which the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services’ constructs, manages and makes up incarcerated transgender people in Ontario, Canada. The resulting analysis indicates that transgender people in Ontario prisons are made up by conflicting policy characterizations that precariously position them as fluctuating between two diametrically opposed subject positions: at-risk and risky. These characterizations support the Ministry’s broader effort to (re)frame incarceration as a ‘caring’, ‘inclusive’ practice, making it easier and supposedly safer to incarcerate transgender individuals. Policy reforms, which focus on providing accommodations to trans people who are in prison, perpetuate the idea that this population requires special correctional intervention while failing to see the institution as in need of abolition.