Mix and Match

When certain activities, places and institutions are segregated, such as men's (or boys') and women's (or girls') sports, men's and women's bathrooms or men's and women's jails, what is the criteria for segregation? Biological sex, or gender identity?

When these segregations were conceived, their wasn't a widespread idea of gender as an identity, if the concept existed at all. "Sex" and "gender" were considered synonymous terms, more or less universally. But now that there is, at least in some quarters, the understanding that "male" refers to sex and "woman" refers to gender, when we speak of the various segregations drawn along those lines, how are people being categorized?

National Public Radio has decided that it's self-evident that since we speak of "men's" versus "women's" that gender identity is the divide. "A transgender beauty influencer was put in a men's jail after her arrest in Miami" is written with an assumption that the Miami-Dade County corrections department has done something obviously wrong. Independent evidence, however, is not presented. Now. it's possible that the arresting officers and jail staff knew who Nikita Dragun was, and deliberately placed her in a men's unit, but no evidence is given for that. Likewise, the statement that Ms. Dragun is "legally female" came from a public relations representative, not from any sort of document. So I'm given to believe that when Ms. Dragun was arrested, someone had some reason to understand that while Nikita Dragun identifies as a woman, her original (and maybe current) sex is male.

And that takes us back to the question of who "men's" jails are for: biological males, people who identify as men or some combination of the two. (I suppose that one could ask the same question of women's jails, but a cursory Google search did not reveal any cases of transgender men going to jail...) It's worth a broader social conversation, rather than one driven simply by activists, because as more and more people decide that the way out of narrow gender-role expectations is to change their gender identity, it's going to become more of a concern; although likely still quite rare in the grand scheme of things. Still, given that it's the corner cases where things tend to fall apart, clarity on the topic couldn't hurt.

The media conversation about these sorts of things tends to be driven by the audience of a given media outlet. NPR tends to attract a young, and left-leaning audience, for whom the transgender community are another set of victims to be embraced and championed. I'm sure that Fox News, for example, leans in the other direction. But the mediated conversation between these outlets and their audiences is only part of the conversation that can happen. Society, writ large, is unlikely to become particularly involved. Most people simply don't care enough about the topic, as neither side holds any real terror for them. But still, voices a little less invested in one outcome or another can provide useful input into areas of contention.