Uncloseted Media published this article on Dec. 3.

Editor’s Note: This article includes references to topics such as rape, sexual assault, and violence. Reader discretion is advised.

By HOPE PISONI | Being a transgender woman in prison has always been hard for Lexie Handlang. At 38 years old, she’s a writer for the Prison Journalism Project and is currently working on a kids’ fantasy book starring a young trans girl and her friend who encounter a mysterious magical being.

Handlang has been incarcerated in men’s prisons in Missouri for 11 years, where she says she’s experienced a great deal of violence and discrimination.

She says her fears today are at an all-time high. After Trump passed an executive order on his first day in office that rolled back a suite of the scant and hard-won rights of trans women in federal prisons, Handlang remembers prison staff gleefully gloating.

“Transgenders don’t exist no more.”

“It’s not a thing.”

“I’m not gonna call you by your preferred pronouns.”

“I’m gonna call you ‘sir.’”

The executive order, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” includes a mandate requiring trans women to be housed in men’s prisons and a ban on the use of federal funds for gender-affirming care.

The following month, the Bureau of Prisons issued a memo banning gender-affirming items like chest binders and undergarments and requiring staff to refer to incarcerated people by their “legal name or pronouns corresponding to their biological sex.”

While the order does not apply to state prison systems, Uncloseted Media spoke with five trans women incarcerated in three different states who say Trump’s crackdown has created a trickle-down effect. They say it has produced a climate where staff are ramping up their mistreatment of trans women, federal grants for prisons are at risk as the Trump administration feuds with states, and anti-trans propaganda is turning fellow prisoners against them.

“There’s a lot of wardens who’ve been waiting for this — the discrimination has increased and it’s not anything new,” says Kenna Barnes, advocacy manager at Black and Pink, a nonprofit focused on prison abolition and the rights of incarcerated trans people. “It’s happening in every faction of the carceral system, and they are getting very emboldened, and this is a cue for them.”

Escalating attacks

Even though the Trump administration can’t force anti-trans policies on state prisons, they have still been pushing for them. In April, the Department of Justice pulled $1.4 million in funds from Maine’s Department of Corrections, the bulk of which had been allocated to support a substance use treatment program for all incarcerated people. The funding was pulled in retaliation for continuing to allow a trans woman, Andrea Balcer, to be housed in the women’s section of the Maine Correctional Center.

“You asked my feelings on being in the center of this feud between Trump and Maine — I am not in the center, I am underneath the feet of these two giants colliding, a mecha and a kaiju if you will,” Balcer, 24, told Uncloseted Media in a phone interview from the prison. “So I am not so much the center as I am collateral damage.”

Balcer was transferred to the women’s section of the prison in November 2023 due to concerns about her safety in men’s prisons, which are notoriously dangerous for trans women.

She spends much of her time playing Pathfinder, a role-playing game based on Dungeons & Dragons, and has been trying to start a group to host discussions on paganism and monthly full-moon rituals.

Balcer says she tries to keep a low profile and was getting along fairly well with her fellow prisoners after a period of adjustment.

But that changed when Attorney General Pam Bondi bullied her on Fox and Friends by calling her a “giant, 6-foot-1, 245-pound guy” and claimed that funding cuts “will protect women in prisons.” Balcer says some women at the facility turned on her and started to parrot Bondi’s rhetoric about a “man in a woman’s prison.”

“The cultural backlash has been astounding,” she says. “And it’s not that I don’t understand these women — I 100 percent understand their position. Things that have helped them and things that have done so many good things for them are being taken away, and they’re angry, as they have every right to be. But they can’t take out their anger on the people who quite frankly deserve it, [so] they take out their anger on the people that are the indirect cause of this.”

While Balcer says things have slightly improved since Maine successfully appealed the funding cuts, life is still much harder under Trump 2.0.

And she’s not the only trans woman who has a target on her back. Michelle Kailani Calvin was housed at the Central California Women’s Facility since the state’s Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act — which she advocated for — passed in 2021. The act allowed trans women to be housed in women’s facilities.

Calvin, 54, was one of several trans women whose photos were included in a consequential advertisement for Trump’s 2024 campaign, which criticized Kamala Harris for supporting gender-affirming surgery in California prisons and included the infamous slogan “Kamala’s for they/them, not you.”

Difficulty accessing gender-affirming care

While gender-affirming surgeries in prison are still legally accessible in California, Calvin told Uncloseted Media via a phone call from CCWF that she has found it “very difficult … to get any kind of care” since Trump’s reelection.

She says she was scheduled for facial feminization surgery and a revision to her bottom surgery earlier this year to address complications including pain, bladder leakage and intense bleeding. Staff kept delaying them, however, claiming that she hadn’t passed a psychiatric evaluation and that she had a “dirty” toxicology report. According to Calvin, the substance that had been flagged was prescription gabapentin.

Calvin believes this foot-dragging is due to the Trump administration’s threats to cut funding, as they did with Maine.

“This is the game that the institution plays. Instead of just saying, ‘We’re not giving you a surgery because Trump ain’t giving us our money,’” she says.

Emboldened staff

Beyond having limited access to health care, Calvin says trans women face emboldened staff in Trump’s new America. In her case, this has involved increased scrutiny: After three years of no rule violations, she says she was hit with five in the span of four months.

She says several of those cases were provoked by abuse from guards. In one instance, which was documented in a report reviewed by Uncloseted Media, a guard forcefully removed her from her wheelchair and slammed her on the ground after he squeezed her shoulder without consent. She was later written up for resisting an officer.

And in March, the prison began investigating Calvin on allegations that she had assaulted her partner, who is also incarcerated. This led the prison to file a case with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Departmental Review Board to have her moved to a men’s prison.

Calvin says that numerous advocacy groups then sent letters to CDCR calling on them to reject the push. One lawyer, Jen Orthwein, wrote that “claims made against Ms. Calvin were submitted long after the alleged event by unnamed confidential informants, with no supporting documentation or medical evidence” and that the alleged victim “has indicated that the accusations are entirely false.” Uncloseted Media also spoke with the alleged victim from the prison where she is housed, and she affirmed that “Michelle never hurt me or any other female.”

“[The prison] feels like the Trump administration’s gonna have their back on whatever that they do, so they’re taking more bolder chances to isolate us or send us back to a men’s facility,” says Calvin.

While Calvin is still at a women’s facility, not everyone has been so lucky. CDCR recently proposed new guidelines that explicitly create a process for trans women to be transferred back to men’s prisons if they have “two or more serious Rules Violation Reports within a 12-month period.” Kelli Blackwell, 58, told Uncloseted Media on a phone call from CCWF that at least three trans women have been transferred to men’s prisons since 2024, which we confirmed on the California Incarcerated Records and Information Search website.

Blackwell is hopeful she’ll get released soon. With that in mind, she got her dentistry license and is set to earn a degree in sociology next spring. She also has a partner living with her in the women’s facility. But with increased scrutiny from CDCR and pressure from the Trump administration, she fears that a transfer to a men’s prison could disrupt all of that.

“You have trans women here that’s actually had the surgery, had the vaginoplasty — they’re still finding ways to send them back to a men’s prison,” she says.

In an email, CDCR said that they are “committed to providing a safe, humane, respectful and rehabilitative environment for all incarcerated people.” They also noted that the department “has a detailed process for patients seeking gender-affirming care, including hormonal treatment.”

Support systems have become ‘useless’

Trans women in prison are also losing the little support they had. Patricia Trimble, a 66-year-old trans woman, writer and advocate, has been incarcerated in men’s facilities in Missouri since 1979. While in prison, she’s pursued paralegal studies at Platt Junior College, theology at St. Louis University and business at Central Methodist University.

She’s used her education to advocate for herself, often through the Transgender Committee, a group of staff members required by law at each Missouri prison. The committee is meant to help the prison “make informed recommendations regarding the health and safety of transgender and intersex offenders.”

However, Trimble says that since the start of the year, the committee has become “absolutely useless.”

“At one point in time, I could sit down with the Transgender Committee … and we would discuss things that make the prison safer, and they were receptive,” Trimble told Uncloseted Media on a phone call from the Southeast Correctional Center.

“Since Trump, there are no conversations like that. When I go to the Transgender Committee, the deputy warden just kinda looks at me with that smile on her face like ‘you ain’t gettin’ nothing here, and I already know what you’re gonna ask, so let’s just go through the motions and then you can go away.’”

Trimble says this makes every issue harder to fight. In a recent incident, she tried to get transferred after being housed with a transphobic cellmate who would “bully” and “constantly pick on” her.

Trimble says that even though there were empty cells in her wing, she was sent back and forth between the Transgender Committee, case workers and her unit manager before getting approved to move into one of them. While she had the know-how to stand up for herself, most people don’t.

Even with her experience in advocacy, she says staff have been harder than usual on her. Earlier this year, after advocating for gender-affirming surgery, she says the prison put her on a call with a doctor who said she “will not be filing a report recommending any further treatment.”

“She had the audacity to tell me that she finds that I no longer suffer from gender dysphoria,” Trimble says. “And I just kinda laughed and said, ‘Okay, I guess we’re done here,’ and I got up and left.”

In an email, the Missouri Department of Corrections wrote that they do not “tolerate unprofessional conduct by staff,” and that “no changes [have been] made to policies pertaining to transgender residents of Missouri state prisons after the 2024 election.”

The danger of men’s prisons

While life in the women’s facilities is far from perfect, the people we spoke with say it’s worth fighting to stay.

According to a 2016 analysis by the Williams Institute at UCLA, 37 percent of incarcerated trans people — the overwhelming majority of whom are housed in prisons that do not match their gender identity — had experienced sexual assault within a one-year period, compared to just over 3 percent of cis people.

Blackwell says physical violence at the men’s prison, often spurred by gang activity, is “structured” and “can get you killed.” Calvin says she was raped multiple times at the men’s prison, and Trimble recounted numerous instances when guards strip-searched her in the presence of men.

Handlang says she’s experienced extreme abuse by guards at the men’s prison: “They went in my cell and they were ripping up pictures of family, trying to get me to react, ripping up my clothes, ripping up my bras, ripping up panties, destroying my makeup.” When she tried to fight back, she says “they went off camera and they broke my ankle and my foot and stomped on me and punched on me.”

As threats continue to escalate, and Trump’s policies continue to trickle down, Trimble fears she could lose the few rights she has left.

“I know that all it would take is a phone call from Trump or one of Trump’s surrogates to the governor, and the governor simply signs an executive order and everything we’ve got is taken away and we would end up having to go to court again,” she says. “If the governor wanted to, he could make our lives a lot worse with just a stroke of the pen.”

Fighting back

In the face of all these horrors, these women are advocating for themselves and caring for their trans sisters.

Handlang says that this often involves the most basic gestures: listening to their troubles, teaching them how to do their makeup and helping them buy hygiene products.

Calvin and Blackwell are still working to defend and uphold the trans-inclusive bills they helped pass, and Trimble has used her years of experience to work with legal advocacy groups to get support for things like name changes and to pressure the state to address mistreatment.

“If you’re going to be an advocate or an activist … it can never be about you,” Trimble says. “It’s about our boys and girls that are suffering in this oppressive system.”