general prison population as well as those held in solitary confinement, there is a particularly strong culture of fear that is built up around segregation units and the prisoners who are held there. Inmates who appear to belong to particular minority groups are often profiled by prison guards as more likely to be dangerous, violent, or involved in a gang, and therefore are moved into isolation; for example, prisoners who speak a language other than English are sometimes targeted as foreign and therefore gang-involved or dangerous. Transgender inmates in solitary confinement Transgender or gender nonconforming people are over represented in prisons, especially transgender people of color. This could be partly due to the fact that they are disproportionately homeless or living in poverty, conditions which more often lead to incarceration, and because they are targeted by the police and perceived as violent or sexually promiscuous (transgender women in particular). These misconceptions can also be used as reasons that guards place transgender inmates in solitary confinement. The issues that cisgender women face in prisons in general and in solitary confinement in particular can be exacerbated for transgender women, and for transgender men as well. For example, transgender inmates are much more likely to be sexually assaulted than their cisgender counterparts. Allegedly to protect against this kind of thing, transgender offenders are often put into solitary confinement. Transgender women are sometimes put in male prisons and then separated from the general prison population and put in “protective custody,” which functions in the same ways as solitary confinement, and in fact transgender inmates are sometimes put into segregation facilities that have worse conditions than the ones that cisgender inmates are in. This is said to be for their own safety, since most harassment and assault comes from other prisoners. However, this does not prevent the violence perpetrated by prison guards. Further, while transgender women are often put into confinement to keep them from becoming victims of violence, they are sometimes held near inmates who have been put into confinement because of past violent actions, and then experience violence from those inmates. Being in solitary confinement can have consequences for transgender women's mental and physical health, in particular because transgender people are already more likely to suffer from depression or other mental illness. Prisoners, and especially those in solitary confinement, do not always have access to the necessary medications, and transgender people specifically are