This post was written with Policing Project Intern Charles Kolodziej.
Consider a scenario where an officer pulls over someone who identifies as transgender during a routine traffic stop. Looking at the driver’s license, the officer may find that the gender or photo does not match the officer’s perception of the driver’s gender. As a result, the officer may assume that the driver is impersonating someone else or driving with falsified identification. The officer may even make inappropriate assumptions that the driver is engaging in sex work or other criminal activity. The officer may ask invasive questions regarding the driver’s body and even end up physically searching the driver’s body to determine their sex in order to fill out police reports.
This experience is not hypothetical. According to the U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), among transgender people who interacted with police in the past year and said officers were aware they were transgender, 58% reported some form of mistreatment, 49% reported being repeatedly misgendered, and 6% reported physical or sexual assault.
The consequences of a mishandled interaction between police and trans individuals can be severe. In addition to the risk of a use of force incident related to the potential false assumptions outlined above, trans individuals face significant risk of being outed, which can ultimately result in social ostracism, unemployment, or violence. The USTS also found transgender people face a higher risk of discrimination and physical and sexual violence during incarceration, and trans people in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers are often housed in facilities that don’t match their gender identity or are inappropriately placed in solitary confinement.
Further, despite being at a higher societal risk of assault and violence generally, many transgender people don’t report instances of brutality to law enforcement, precisely because they fear discrimination or harassment from the very people tasked with protecting them, due to events both historical and current. It is crucial that police officers understand the experiences of trans individuals in order to address their specific concerns and protect their safety, while also avoiding potentially dangerous or dehumanizing situations.
Efforts to improve police interactions with transgender people
Several major cities have taken note of these issues and begun to adopt policies that outline best practices governing interactions between police officers and members of the transgender community. These policies are designed to give officers some brief cultural understanding of transgender people and the problems they face, or clarify protocols such as those regarding search and seizure, transfer of arrestees, proper forms of address, or processing procedure.
For example, during a search or arrest, the San Francisco Police Department’s “Interacting with Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Nonbinary Individuals” policy instructs officers not to remove “appearance related items” such as wigs, makeup or prosthetics, as doing so would alter an individual’s gender expression. The SFPD policy also contains a glossary of words pertaining to LGBTQ identity generally that provides officers with the vocabulary needed to interact respectfully with trans individuals, including explicitly banning officers from using language deemed dehumanizing or disrespectful.
The Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department’s “Handling Interactions with Transgender Individuals” is also notable in its extensive protocols on the subject of protecting trans arrestees in police custody from sexual assault and violence. This includes information on taking proper care not to “out” trans detainees to other arrestees or officers as well as clear instructions to ask trans arrestees their preference with respect to the gender of an officer conducting body searches.
Other policies contain training related to pronoun usage and proper forms of address, giving examples (he/him, she/her, they/them, etc.) and directing officers to use the pronouns that correspond to a person’s gender identity. The Milwaukee Police Department’s “Interactions with Transgender, Intersex, and/or Gender Non-Conforming (TIGN) Persons,” instructs officers to respect the pronouns an individual uses, including “they/them” for individuals that identify as nonbinary. The policy from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department instructs officers who are unsure whether an individual identifies as transgender or non-binary to inquire how the individual would like to be addressed (e.g., Sir, Miss, Ms, Mx.).
More work remains to be done
In creating a policy outlining respectful interactions between police and transgender individuals, it is imperative that these policies be formulated in consultation with local members of the transgender community in order to implement a policy reflective of the jurisdiction’s transgender constituents. However, departments looking to initiate these efforts can also consult with advocacy groups, such as the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), which has released a guide to best practices and policy recommendations, including:
The policy should explicitly prohibit the use of gender identity or expression to any degree as a basis to stop, question, search, or arrest any individual, as a sole basis for initiating contact, or as evidence of any crime, including prostitution-related offenses.
Policy should explicitly prohibit sexual harassment or use of language that is demeaning or derogatory on the basis of gender identity or expression.
Policy should state that trans and gender-nonconforming people are never to be asked invasive questions about their anatomy, medical history, or sexual practices that are not relevant to an investigation.
All departmental forms and records should include a space for “Name currently used (if different from legal name),” and “Legal Name” in addition to any spaces currently designated for “alias.” Pronouns should be recorded along with “Name Currently Used.”
Under no circumstances should members of the department frisk or search any person, including searches premised on an individual’s consent, for the purpose of viewing or assigning gender based on the person’s anatomy or genitalia or for any demeaning or harassing purpose.
In the event that a transgender or gender-nonconforming person is in police custody and held in an area segregated by gender, the individual should be consulted on where they feel most safe before placement, and every effort will be made to ensure the person will be placed where they say they will feel most safe.
Prescription hormones shall be treated like any other prescription medication necessary for an individual’s health and wellbeing.
Transgender people shall not be asked to remove appearance-related items, regardless of where they are housed, if non-transgender individuals of the same gender identity are not also required to do so.
The department’s transgender policies should be readily accessible to the public at no cost via the department’s website and external search engines.
In this same report, NCTE also evaluated the policies of the 25 largest U.S. police departments for 17 criteria based on common areas of interaction between police and transgender people. Critically, none of the departments received a green score (meaning the department’s policy met the standards of NCTE’s recommended policy) for all criteria of the evaluation. It is also notable that NCTE is currently partnering with the Miami-Dade Police Department to revise and add to the department’s trans-rights policies.
Policies that provide clear guidance on dealing with transgender individuals in a respectful manner are a good start. However, policies, of course, are only good on paper. It takes training, departmental commitment, and accountability to the public to ensure that the expectations of the policies take root on the street and actually improve outcomes for the transgender community when interacting with law enforcement.