ABSTRACT
How sex, gender and sexualities matter in criminal justice has been of academic and political concern for over 50 years. Over this time, the routine injustices experienced by women have been explored and explained. We know, for instance, that extra-legal assessments of women as ‘respectable’ women fundamentally shape their access to justice as both victims and lawbreakers. In recent years, a sense of what needs to be done has been challenged by a vision of justice that privileges (at the level of theory) individuals’ gender and sexual identities and (at the level of politics) focuses on the injustices experienced by trans people in a justice system that is fundamentally sex-segregated. The result has been a bitter public dispute about the placement of transwomen in women’s prisons. As important as prison placement policies are, they represent one (very small) part of a complex system of administering criminal justice. Hence, this chapter takes a broader view and looks at how biological sex still matters in the administration of criminal justice as well as why it ought to matter before taking seriously and assessing the key theoretical and political claims made by queer criminology and on behalf of trans individuals.
