Cases of trans women on death row illustrate larger systemic issues facing trans people behind bars

Adam Rhodes

Jul 15, 2026

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In the early evening of Jan. 3, 2023, at a prison in eastern Missouri, the state executed 49-year-old Amber McLaughlin by lethal injection. In just 12 minutes, McLaughlin ascended to claim the macabre moniker as the first transgender person executed in the U.S. 

McLaughlin, sentenced to death over the 2003 rape and murder of her girlfriend, started transitioning just a few years before she was executed. 

She was reportedly just the second woman put to death in the state of Missouri, and the first in nearly 70 years. 

The very existence of transgender incarcerated people such as McLaughlin has long been a political football for both Democrats and Republicans, who debate over abstract concepts and ethical quandaries rather than focus on the vulnerable people facing some of the highest rates of abuse behind bars. 

Critics of providing incarcerated trans people with individualized housing choice and gender-affirming care routinely make hypothetical appeals to save taxpayer money and to the safety of others who are incarcerated. At their most vitriolic, critics argue that trans people such as McLaughlin—namely those convicted of violent offenses—are somehow undeserving of medical care that will alleviate documented and excruciating suffering as they languish on death row for years.  

Under President Donald Trump, attacks on incarcerated trans people have evolved from inflammatory articles and commentary to targeted policymaking.

“I think right now, transgender people across the board are easy targets and have been made to be targets, particularly by the current administration,” said Ethan Rice, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal, the nation’s oldest and largest LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization.

“And some of the rhetoric is that transgender people are particularly violent. I don’t think there’s any basis in fact for suggesting that, of course. … So I think that’s just one thing that’s just in the atmosphere.”

Invisibilized  

On the first day of his second presidential term, Trump issued an executive order that severely restricted the access of transgender incarcerated people to safe housing and proper medical care. The sweeping executive order bars the federal government from funding gender-affirming care, mandates that trans women be housed in men’s prisons, and instructs the federal government to remove protections for transgender people from Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) guidelines. 

PREA, passed by Congress in 2003, tasked federal agencies with establishing rules and guidelines to reduce sexual violence in prisons and jails. President Barack Obama’s administration added new protections for LGBTQIA+ people to the U.S. Department of Justice’s PREA rulebook in 2012. In early December, the Trump administration signaled its plans to roll back those landmark protections.

In June 2026, a federal judge again issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from withholding gender-affirming care to transgender people in prisons due to a class-action suit over the restrictions brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Just days earlier, that same judge, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, blocked the administration from sending trans women to men’s prisons.

Despite the Trump administration’s blatant efforts to make it appear as if trans people inside use extraordinary resources, reporting from The New York Times in October 2024 revealed that the Bureau of Prisons provided a range of gender-affirming care to a “small number” of transgender people in prisons, spending between $60,000 to $95,000 a year on hormone therapy. 

“I think in the prison context, people see it as using their tax dollars toward something that maybe they don’t support,” Rice said. “If there’s somebody who’s on death row, that person needs medical care as well.”

“And if they’re going to have to be—and so many people are—on death row for 15 to 20 years, then you’re going to need to provide medical care to that person, whatever medical care they need. And this care is the same; it’s medically necessary and it should be provided.”

Recent tallies report the number of transgender people in state prisons at around 5,000, with another 2,200 in federal custody—compared with the 2 million people overall held in local, state, federal, and tribal prison systems across the country. And among the already invisibilized, minute number of transgender people behind bars across the U.S., the number on death row is microscopic. 

In fact, an analysis by Prism found just six transgender people currently on death row in the U.S. 

Some of these six people declined to comment for this story, others were unreachable. Ultimately, none were available to speak on the record. 

In many ways, the six trans people on death row—all of whom are trans women—illustrate many of the systemic struggles trans people face behind bars. 

As a practical matter, the true number of trans people in prison—let alone on death row—is largely unknowable. Some facilities may not collect or report the data, for example, or incarcerated people may not want to disclose that information or may not yet identify as trans. The federal government stopped reporting statistics about trans people in its survey of sexual violence in prison. 

According to Prism’s analysis, all but one of the trans women on death row are housed in men’s prisons, despite independent research and government data for years detailing the extreme rates of sexual violence trans people experience in prisons and jails. The government’s own data, including a 2011 Department of Justice survey, has reported that incarcerated trans people experience sexual violence at more than 12 times the rate of other incarcerated people.

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that given the current political landscape, the way these women are housed is unsurprising—especially when considering the broader conditions trans people face behind bars. 

“These are decisions that are not made rationally, logically,” Maher told Prism. “They’re made from places of emotion, of fear, and maybe even hatred. So you know that is not going to necessarily lead to decisions that are appropriate for housing.”

Rice said these demonstrably unsafe housing decisions are also a stark departure from the spirit of PREA and other laws aimed at protecting vulnerable incarcerated people. 

Politically, these half-a-dozen trans women are the very people Republicans target when they conjure up a transphobic scapegoat to foment support for anti-trans prison policies. But rather than shouting into a vacuum, these pundits and politicians have an ally in the media. 

The anti-trans media ecosystem  

While The New York Times reporting highlighted the Trump administration’s hypocritical criticism of providing incarcerated trans people with gender-affirming care, the outlet has also fomented the vitriol experienced by incarcerated people—especially those on death row. 

The Times was the most high-profile outlet to report that one of the perpetrators of the infamous Cheshire murders, named after the small Connecticut town in which they occurred, was in the process of transitioning. Linda Hayes was sentenced to death for the murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Michaela and Hayley, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison when Connecticut abolished the death penalty. For the past 20 years, the crimes have been rehashed and regurgitated in documentaries, podcasts, and throughout the broader true-crime media ecosystem.

When Newsweek profiled Hayes in early 2025, detailing her lifelong gender dysphoria and the new sense of peace she felt as a trans woman, conservative outlets pounced, once again thrusting her into the spotlight. 

Fox News highlighted critics of the article, who called it a “puff piece.” In the reporting, the conservative outlet repeatedly misgendered and deadnamed Hayes. 

Rice, of Lambda Legal, said the inflammatory coverage more broadly reflects the rising animus against trans people.

“I think the atmosphere around transgender people has really shifted over the last few years to not just being sometimes neutral and sometimes negative reactions, but now a whole group of people pushing for a view of transgender people that’s a really horrible view,” Rice said.

But Hayes isn’t alone in bearing the brunt of the anti-trans media ecosystem.

Take Jessica M. Hann, who was sentenced to death in 2014 for killing her two young children. When word reached reporters that she was granted gender-affirming surgery after coming out as transgender post-conviction, reporters scrambled to expose what they thought was a scandal. 

Of the most hateful was the Daily Caller, a right-wing website founded by political commentator Tucker Carlson. The outlet called Hann a “two-time baby killer” and repeatedly misgendered and dehumanized her—arguably in an effort to foment hatred against incarcerated trans people.

And when former child actor Skylar DeLeon transitioned in the early 2000s after being sentenced to death for murdering a couple aboard their yacht, conservative and mainstream outlets alike sensationalized the story. ABC News glibly reported DeLeon’s “self-mutilation” and even reported that “the cold-blooded killings may have been driven by Deleon’s gender identity”—a particularly dangerous and unfounded allegation, particularly in an era when anti-trans activists and legislators aim to paint trans people as mentally ill and violent. 

According to legal experts, trans people behind bars suffer under systems that punish and stigmatize them for being incarcerated, and then further punish and stigmatize them for being transgender. They are subsequently punished even further for being both incarcerated and trans.  

“The criminalization of trans people for being trans is also increasing,” Rice said. “Recently, Idaho passed a law that criminalizes using the bathroom in accordance with your gender identity, in private and public bathroom spaces. That can be a misdemeanor on your first time or a felony if you do it the second time.” The attorney also noted that the level of criminalization now facing trans people is “alarming,” and that—for whatever reason—trans people accessing gender-affirming care really seems to “set people off.”   

Landmark cases  

Only one of the six trans women on death row identified as transgender at the time of her conviction: Victoria Drain. In one other instance, Jenna Rogers made arguments related to her gender identity in court documents while seeking a new trial. The two are considered landmark cases and may signal how courts will interrogate claims of transphobic bias in the criminal legal system, and the role serious mental anguish may play during a capital trial. 

Drain, a trans woman sentenced to death in 2019, argued before the Ohio Supreme Court in 2021 that the ineffective counsel she received at trial was in part because of her public defender’s hatred for trans people. Drain was on trial for murdering another incarcerated person whom she tried to recruit to kill someone she suspected of previously sexually abusing children. At the time of the killing, Drain was already serving a nearly 40-year sentence for stabbing and strangling a man to death in 2016. 

In a brief to the court, Drain’s new attorneys argued that the public defender had outright refused to use her proper name and pronouns and fast-tracked the case in order to rid himself of having to represent her. Drain’s case offered the court a novel opportunity to see how anti-transgender bias can affect the outcomes of capital cases. But Drain’s arguments were rejected by the court and her death penalty was then reinstated in late 2022, before the court granted a stay of execution in January 2023.

Like her other trans counterparts on death row, Drain was the subject of dehumanizing media profiles. In an article about the state Supreme Court decision putting her execution on hold, the Epoch Times called her a “a twice-convicted killer with disputed diagnoses of gender dysphoria and other mental issues.” 

In Rogers’ case, she argued in a July 2020 petition to the U.S. Supreme Court that she should be granted a new trial based on a psychologist’s assertion that her intense gender dysphoria made her previously unable to waive her right to a jury in the penalty phase of her trial and her right to an attorney in court proceedings after her conviction. Rogers first made the arguments on appeal in Florida nearly a decade ago, but the state’s highest court rejected her arguments in 2019. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case in October 2020. 

Pleas for mercy  

As landmark as McLaughlin’s January 2023 execution was in Missouri, her case also illustrates how the criminal legal system works hard to punish, and doubly hard to avoid accountability. 

Experts and legal scholars said the state’s decision to kill McLaughlin raises significant legal questions—her trans identity aside. 

At the time of her 2006 trial, jurors couldn’t come to a unanimous conclusion when debating whether to put McLaughlin to death. Missouri law afforded a controversial path forward: With the jury deadlocked, the decision lay with St. Louis County Circuit Judge Steven Goldman, who unilaterally decided that McLaughlin deserved to die. 

Legal scholars argued before McLaughlin’s execution that Goldman’s decision deprived her of her constitutional right to a jury trial, and the scandal surrounding the ruling earned the attention of some of the state’s top legal minds and representatives in Congress. 

In an October 2022 letter to former Gov. Mike Parson, seven retired judges—including a former chief justice—called on the governor to commute McLaughlin’s sentence. 

“McLaughlin was sentenced to death via a flaw in Missouri’s capital sentencing scheme,” the judges wrote. “Missouri law permits a trial judge to make independent factual findings (both as to aggravating and mitigating factors) and to impose a sentence of death when a jury deadlocks on whether the death penalty is warranted. Missouri’s capital sentencing procedure removes the life-or-death decision from the jury when the jury cannot vote unanimously for death, and places that awesome power in the hands of one individual.”

In their own letter, then-U.S. Rep. Cori Bush and current U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver argued, “Ms. McLaughlin’s cruel execution would mark the state’s first use of the death penalty on a woman since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, and even worse it would not solve any of the systemic problems facing Missourians and people all across America, including anti-LGBTQ+ hate and violence, and cycles of violence that target and harm women.”

Parson denied an 11th-hour clemency petition, and McLaughlin was put to death that very evening in early January. 

Her execution was both novel and shockingly ordinary. She is one of many killed by the state, despite her pleas for mercy and the questionable ethics and legalities surrounding her case.

Media outlets reported that in her final statement to corrections officials, she said: “I am sorry for what I did. I am a loving and caring person.” 

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor

Adam Rhodes