Autonomy under constraint: Gender self-determination, authenticity, and survival for women in Australian men’s prisons

Background and Aim Trans people and persons with innate variations of sex characteristics (IVSC) are recognized as being at heightened risk of harm within prison systems. Despite a growing body of research, questions of autonomy, authenticity, and the regulation of gendered and embodied selfhood—along with implications for wellbeing—remain underexplored. Drawing on self-determination theory and scholarship on the pains of imprisonment, this article examines how women in men’s prisons negotiate autonomy in systems that often deny them their identities, their selfhood, and their safety.Methods This article undertakes a multiple-case study of three trans women and one woman born with IVSC with experience of being incarcerated in men’s prisons across Australia. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore these women’s lived experiences, exploring adverse events (e.g. experiences of violence or acts of discrimination), coping mechanisms, and how these women navigated the prison system and their gender identity concurrently. Thematic analysis was deployed to make meaning of participants’ carceral experiences.Results The analytic process resulted in the development of three major themes surrounding experiences of autonomy in relation to authenticity, self, and safety of women in the men’s carceral system. First, participants described autonomy through a notion of (gendered and intersex-informed) authenticity; second, they discussed autonomy relative to their capacity to express and externalize femininity; and third, they identified constraints on their autonomy in the prison environment. These results demonstrate that, across participants’ accounts, autonomy emerged not as a fixed condition, but as something continually negotiated within the constraints of prison life.Conclusions This multiple-case study argues that autonomy for trans women and women with IVSC in men’s prisons cannot be understood solely as the absence or presence of institutional control and is instead tied to the ability to authentically embody, express, and maintain gendered and embodied selfhood under conditions largely structured around its denial.