Transgender people will now be locked up in their own cells when arrested, Deputy Police Minister Maggie Sotyu said at an imbizo in Gugulethu yesterday.
Sotyu said the police wanted to respect gender rights.
"I was impressed to discover that police have come up with an initiative with regard to detention of transgender people," said Sotyu.
"There are identified police stations where they will be kept away from other people. This is a challenge across all provinces."
Sotyu said this will ensure that transgender people are not victimised by other inmates while in police custody.
She said the initiative was being piloted in the Western Cape and could soon be rolled out to the rest of the country.
The Women's Legal Centre has established a protocol on how police officers should deal with sex workers and transgender people.
Attorney and spokesman Stacey-Leigh Manoek said the WLC hopes to instruct 3 000 officers on the protocol in the Western Cape by March.
"The challenges with transgender people are in relation to arrest, searching and detention.
"For example, police often assume a transgender person is a sex worker," said Manoek.
"When police deal with someone who is biologically male and identifies as a female, often they will treat him or her as a male, and then detain that person with males.
"They do not acknowledge the identity of that person."
She said while a number of police officers believed transgender people to be psychologically disturbed,72% of officers felt sex workers deserved human rights, "which, to us, was profound".
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