TS Madison condemns Trump’s anti-trans crackdown amid fears ‘people will die’

Actress TS Madison has spoken out against President Trump’s executive order which, amongst other things, mandates trans prisoners must be sent to prisons that do not align with their gender identity.

In the order, Trump declared that the government will only recognise two genders – male and female.

Madison, who is trans, told TMZ: “You can put legal sanctions on anything, but you can never ever change anybody’s identity. You have the right to identify exactly however you choose to identify, always.”

“This isn’t just about trans people. It’s an attack on everybody,” she continued.

“Trump may think he can legislate our identities away, but that’s not how this works. We’ve always existed, and we’re not going anywhere.”

Madison is best known for appearing in The Ts Madison Experience, when she became the first Black transgender woman to star in and act as executive producer of her own reality series, as well as being a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The safety of trans prisoners held in facilities with cis prisoners of the opposite gender has been specifically highlighted recently, as advocates fear they will be met with violence.

This is made even more likely by the executive order mandating the federal government to remove protections for transgender people from Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) guidelines, which would have previously sought to deter sexual violence towards trans people in prison.

The order stats that federal agencies must “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” and also “ensure that no federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex”.

Julie Abbate, an advocacy director at Just Detention International – an organisation that works to end sexual abuse in prisons – told The Appeal that the executive order was “life-threatening” to trans people.

“It has immediate consequences to the actual lives and physical, sexual, and social well-being of any transgender person, including those who are locked up,” she said.

“People will die”

Trans prisoners are already subjected to extreme violence in prison, with 31% saying that they feel unsafe as a result, while over half of the trans prison population were sexually assaulted in prison, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

Abbate said: “People will die. It’s unconscionable the President of the United States has issued this order. It’s just unconscionable in its cruelty.”

Trump already tried this back in 2018, when federal prison officials rolled back protections for trans prisoners, removing the recommendation that trans people be house in accordance with their gender identities – but the executive order he signed this week isn’t just guidance, it is binding.

During the campaign, Trump claimed that former vice president Kamala Harris supported “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” and has continued to spew anti-trans rhetoric ever since.

Experts suggest that his executive orders are flouting legal precedent, but will likely cause damage until it can be successfully challenged.

He isn’t stopping with prisons either, with the order ensuring that federal agencies “shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology” and that federal funds “shall not be used to promote gender ideology” in what appears to be an all-out attack on trans rights in the U.S.