Erwann Binet and Pascale Crozon, former Socialist Party representatives, encountered this problem during the hearings for their amendment, which aimed to make it easier for trans people to change their legal gender status.

"I spoke about the situation of transgender detainees during the first meeting of the Prison Studies Group, because I had just been confronted with a testimony by a woman who had been incarcerated with men, which I found highly disturbing," said Crozon, the former congressman for the Rhône department of France. "After that, we wrote to Jean-Jacques Urvoas and met up with him in order to explain to him that there was a real problem here. He said he would think about it, but it was near the end of that administration."

According to Binet, there is no need for laws to improve the daily life of incarcerated transgender people — "just some simple, clear, cogent instructions from the minister of justice."

"This situation needs to receive some attention over at the Justice Department, but up until now nobody has given it any," he says. "Just like nobody took care of how to change one's legal gender status, which should have been the first, indispensable step. There was real reticence on the part of the prime minister's cabinet at the time, a desire not to budge too much on this issue."

The Ministry of Justice disagrees: "Obviously, we can't just send out a memorandum for a dozen people," Youssef Badr says.

Will the pressure have to come from abroad as France continues to regularly be condemned by the European Human Rights Court for its prison conditions, as well as for the way that it treats transgender people? In January 2016, a special reporter for the United Nations presented a report to the Human Rights Council regarding "torture and other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatments or sentences, and the way in which they specifically affect women and the LGBT community."

Meanwhile, other countries are contemplating evolving in ways that have been seen as more or less beneficial. In 2010, Italy was planning on opening up a prison in Pozzale, Tuscany, that would only house trans people, but the project wound up going nowhere. For François Bès of the International Prison Observatory, it was "counterproductive, because it would still foster discrimination ... in creating ghettos, you deprive people of socialization," he says.

"In Colombia, in Argentina, or Ecuador, on the other hand, the standard framework you have is fairly forward-thinking," says Jean-Sébastien Blanc, an adviser on matters of prison detention for the Geneva-based Organization for the Prevention of Torture. "Prison rules and regulations recommend that placement be decided according to a person's perceived gender, and by consulting those involved," he says. "But there is nevertheless a large gap between this progressive legal framework and the reality on the ground."



Does France need a media figure like Chelsea Manning in the US for the powers that be to start moving forward on the matter? In June 2016, the French government announced that it would be putting into place a "plan advocating against hatred and discrimination toward LGBT people," collaboratively drawn up with the heads of the Prison Administration and the Ministry of Justice. "We are, more specifically, mobilizing for axis number 5 of the 2nd priority, to 'continue to improve the treatment of freedom-deprived LGBT people,''' Badr says. The plan involves three points:

Putting the question of anti-LGBT acts on the agenda of prison surveillance commissions once a year;



Favoring, when it is in the interest of and in order to protect those involved, and taking into account the preservation of order in the correctional facility, individual cells for persons who are endangered by their sexual orientation or gender identity, avoiding inasmuch as possible putting them into separate quarters;

Allowing the number of a hotline for victims of anti-LGBT acts to be added to the list of numbers available to detainees at telephone stations inside correctional facilities (calls are free and anonymous).



However, of the annual budget of 1.5 million euros that's been allotted for the plan, it is impossible to know how much will be set aside for the aforementioned axis number 5: "Those numbers are not meant to be communicated to the public," the spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice says. The Ministry of Justice could not provide details of these nonmandatory measures, or about when they will be put into effect.

The completion of the full plan was only supposed to take three years. But a year and a half after this plan was first was announced, the projects are still being reviewed by the board of the prison administration.