Trump Justice Department Obscures Trans Victims of Prison Sexual Abuse While Singling Out Trans Perpetrators

This story originally appeared on The Advocate.The Trump administration has once again all but erased transgender people from reports about sexual violence in prisons and jails across the country — except to report data about trans people as perpetrators of violence. The same reports mention transgender victims behind labels such as “other.”The two Bureau of Justice Statistics reports, based on the results of the anonymous National Inmate Survey conducted in 2023 and 2024, that were released last week, glaringly obscure data about trans people as victims of violence behind bars. The reports, which focus on prisons and local jails, respectively, categorize individual respondents’ “personal identity” as a man, woman, or “other.” And those prisoners dubbed “other” reported sexual abuse at incredibly high rates — at roughly 32 percent in prison and 26 percent in jail.The only time the word “transgender” actually appears is in tables describing the perceived identity of perpetrators and in methodology footnotes explaining how respondents were classified, but do not use that label in the victim demographic tables.Related: Trump just rolled out a cruel anti-trans prison policy doctors are calling ‘dangerous’Trans survivors describe rampant abuse behind barsSara Kielly, a trans woman incarcerated in New York, told The Advocate that trans people “are overrepresented and maliciously underprotected” behind bars in the United States. Kielly is a journalist who routinely reports on conditions behind bars from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. “I am not surprised that the current administration does not take seriously the barriers to safety and bodily integrity/autonomy faced by trans people incarcerated nationwide,” she said. “Sexual harassment and abuse of trans people in our nation’s prisons is rampant, and often committed with impunity.”Kielly said over the course of about a decade in New York men’s prisons, she was repeate