More than a year after the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department announced efforts to house female transgender inmates based on their gender identity, officials say the department is moving in the right direction — but some critics insist it’s not moving fast enough.

Sheriff Vicki Hennessy said the department has been making steady, if slow, progress when it comes to transgender-rights issues, requiring deputies to undergo gender-awareness training and working with advocates to develop a department policy for handling inmates whose gender identity differs from what’s on their birth certificates.

But the policy, which addresses not just housing but how a transgender inmate is treated from booking to release, has been stalled for months in negotiations with unions representing jail deputies and managers.

Hennessy, who took on the job after former Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi announced plans for changes in late 2015, acknowledged that she did not expect the process to take as long as it has.

“Once I got into it, I realized how specialized, how very nuanced this really was in terms of being respectful and maintaining the safety of the jail,” Hennessy said. “The training is important because this is new to people. I can tell them, ‘Do it,’ and then I can be undermined. Or, I can bring them along. My goal is to bring people along so they understand why we are doing things the way we’re doing them.”

For one transsexual woman who went on a 64-day hunger strike in jail last summer to protest her treatment, the change in policy — and attitude — needs to happen sooner rather later.

Athena Cadence, 29, staged her hunger strike after being jailed on assault and false imprisonment charges, which she says stemmed from a psychotic episode she had when she was prescribed the wrong medication in November 2015.

Cadence ended her hunger strike in August, when her sentence was up and she was released. She went straight to a hospital, 40 pounds lighter, but said she felt optimistic about the Sheriff’s Department’s progress on transgender issues.

The Transgender Law Center was working with the department, deputies were allowing her strip-searches to be conducted by volunteer female deputies, and “it seemed like things were going pretty well,” Cadence said.

But then she was remanded into custody briefly in November and “was labeled as male,” she said. “I was ‘Athena Cadence, the man.’

“It was incredibly frustrating,” she said. “Because (Hennessy’s) deputies and the Department of Public Health classified me as a man, I had to withstand male deputies violently removing clothes against my will. I had to withstand deputies making sexual comments as I was cavity-checked. I had to withstand violent extractions by bigoted deputies in riot gear.”

Sheriff’s officials declined to comment about Cadence’s treatment, saying department policy bars them from discussing individual cases. But even as the policy makes its way through the meet-and-confer process with the unions, Hennessy said she has made it a priority to improve the treatment of transgender inmates in county jails.

Although Mirkarimi announced in September 2015 that he planned to house transgender women based on their preferences, Hennessy said when she took over last January, the transgender population was still housed together in a unit separate from the general population in County Jail No. 4 on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice — a jail that has long been considered the oldest and most decrepit of the city’s four lockups.

She confirmed Cadence’s account that the transgender population was classified among inmates with “sexual issues,” a category that advocates for transgender people consider offensive. The sheriff said she has since changed the classification to “gender nonconforming” inmates, and moved the female transgender unit to a protected pod in the male population section of County Jail No. 2 around the corner on Seventh Street. There, they have access to programming available to other inmates, such as coding and yoga classes.

The department has long housed transgender inmates in their own unit for their protection, but Cadence said that doesn’t necessarily guarantee more safety. In fact, she said, she was physically and sexually assaulted while she was incarcerated.

“A lot of things that fall under the umbrella of transgenderism have nothing to do with transsexuality, and being a transsexual woman in this population of transgender, gender-variant, gay men, straight men, etc., is actually scary,” she said. “There’s a lot of weird nuance and conflation of all these types of people. A great number of the people who are male-bodied and don’t identify as female actually hate women.”

The sheriff’s ultimate goal is to put transgender inmates in their stated housing preference while balancing safety issues. Hennessy has been working with the Police Department so this process can begin with booking — under the proposed transgender policy, officers would ask suspects for their legal names, their preferred names, their sex and their gender identity.

This would also be when suspects could state their preference of being strip-searched by an officer of a corresponding gender identity.

Representatives of the deputies union did not respond to requests for comment. Theresa Sparks, Mayor Ed Lee’s senior adviser for transgender initiatives, who has been involved in the negotiations, said the union seemed most concerned about the strip-search part of the policy.

“Keep in mind, this has never been done successfully anywhere in the country,” Sparks said.

When Cadence was on the seventh day of her hunger strike, she said, a male deputy tried to strip-search her after she returned from a hospital. When she refused, a female deputy volunteered to conduct the search. Hennessy issued a memo afterward ordering her staff to allow volunteer deputies to conduct searches on transgender inmates — an order counter to current policy — and said that if no volunteers are available, a male deputy should proceed.

Hennessy said she hopes to bypass the issue entirely by getting funding for body scanners. But that may not be the union’s only issue. When Mirkarimi announced his intentions in 2015, the union president called the move “a safety issue and a liability issue.”

“Do you think male inmates are really going to care if a female believes she’s a male but has female parts?” Deputy Eugene Cerbone asked at the time.

“They’re in jail,” Cerbone said. “When did we give these people all these choices? They’re committing crimes. That’s why they’re there, and now we want to ask them what do you feel, what do you think?”

It’s these attitudes that require not just a strong policy but training, Hennessy said.

In an interview, Mirkarimi said it was vital that the Sheriff’s Department continue moving forward.

“It’s taken decades to get to this place,” Mirkarimi said. “At some point, this really boils down to is there the will and the culture that is implementing these policies.”

Cadence said she plans to do what she can to work for changes in the jail system.

“It was a nightmare, and I will never be the same,” Cadence said, “but I will do my best to shield others.”

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vho@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @VivianHo