“Overriding Health and/or Safety Concerns”: Vague Correctional Policies and Targeted Trans Feminine Governance

In Canada, federal, provincial, and territorial correctional policies appear to uphold human rights for trans people in custody. However, critical scholars highlight contradictions within these reforms—especially the use of “overriding health and/or safety concerns” clauses to deny gender-affirming prison placement. These clauses remain unoperationalized within every Canadian correctional policy currently in effect. This paper argues that the lack of clarity in defining an unresolvable overriding concern gives correctional decision-makers unstructured discretion over its parameters. This is particularly problematic given dominant cultural narratives that frame trans women as a danger to cisgender women. Through critical discourse analysis of court/tribunal decisions and current policies, this paper asks: How do these policies continue to pathologize trans women despite claims of reform? I argue that trans rights-compliant correctional reforms discursively construct trans feminine bodies as institutional risks, reproducing carceral transphobia under the guise of inclusion and facilitate the targeted governance of trans women.