What’s Current: Canada’s federal prison service approves transfer of trans-identified male inmate to female prison

Fallon Aubee, née Jean-Paul Aubee. (Image: CBC)

For the first time in Canada, a federally sentenced male inmate will be transferred to a women’s prison. This move is part of a move toward policy that places prisoners according to “self-identified gender or gender expression, regardless of physical anatomy or the gender noted on their identification documents.”

UK pharmacy chain Boots refuses to follow the lead of other retailers that have lowered the cost of emergency contraception. Chief pharmacist Marc Donovan defended the decision by saying the company doesn’t “want to be accused of incentivising inappropriate use.”

A group of 15 Latina teenagers, some of them undocumented, staged a protest called Quinceañera at the Capitol in opposition to a bill that would ban sanctuary cities in the state of Texas.

Lady Brenda Hale, a feminist jurist, has been appointed as the first female president of the UK Supreme Court.

Andrea Ritchie at the New York Times explores how the recommendations of the Trump administration’s Department of Justice Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety will affect women of colour:

“Doubling down on the drug war is likely to result in increased violence, not increased public safety. The damage these policies have done to black communities has been well documented. But less attention has been paid to the ways that women of color specifically are targeted in drug cases and are subject to abuse or assault by police officers…Critics of police violence and mass incarceration have rightfully shed light on the pain of families separated by long prison terms, of women torn from partners and children. But women’s suffering isn’t restricted to heartbreak: They have been raped, choked and killed, all in the service of public safety. Sadly, the recommendations of D.O.J.’s task force are likely to be a recipe for more of the same.”

Lisa Steacy

Lisa Steacy is an Assistant Editor at Feminist Current. She has a B.A. in Women & Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. However, the women she met in her five years as a frontline worker and collective member with Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter deserve almost all of the credit for her feminist education. She lives in Vancouver with her partner and their cats.