Abstract Book of the 4th International Conference on LGBT Studies
Year: 2025
[PDF]
A Missouri Case Study of Deputizing Carceral Care through Anti-Trans Legislation
Dr. Ash Stephens
ABSTRACT:
In February of 2024, the State of Missouri unleashed a proposed legislative bill, titled House Bill 2885 or HB 2885, that forewarned many people in the broader trans community. Though the onslaught of anti-trans bills proposed in the United States has come to feel like commonplace, HB 2885 expressed a level of collusion by the ‘parent’s rights movement’ and the carceral state that blatantly makes clear the connections between anti-trans legislation and the criminal punishment system. HB 2885, though only proposed and now “dead”, was presented as a bill concerned with “social transition” at the kindergarten through 12th grade level and essentially mandated that any teacher or school counselor in the state of Missouri could be charged with a class E felony if the person “provides support, regardless of whether the support is material, information, or other resources to a child regarding social transition” (THE BILL); which would result in a mandatory registration as a sex offender.
From 2020 to present, an increasingly disturbing component of the most recent onslaught of anti-trans, anti-reproductive justice, and anti-bodily autonomy legislative proposals is the deputization of criminal punishment in areas of life colloquially branded as “care spaces”. From parents/caregivers, teachers, healthcare providers, therapists and others, people providing this “care work” are being authorized to wield power over the young people in their lives through these proposed (and sometimes passed) policies. Through an abolitionist feminist and disability justice analysis, this paper explores HB 2885 as a case study of instruction for people operating in these “care spaces” to make punitive complaints about trans and gender nonconforming young people who attempt to express their gender fullness, as well as proposals that attempt to produce criminal punishments and sanctions for these “care workers” themselves.
Keywords: trans studies, carceral care, anti-trans legislation