From The Marshall Project:
The last few years have brought a wave of anti-trans legislation. Hundreds of bills have aimed to prevent trans teens from using certain bathrooms, teachers from using kids’ preferred names or pronouns, student-athletes from competing on the teams they feel comfortable on and medical providers from prescribing gender-affirming medical care. Some states have even tried to send parents, medical personnel, educators and others to jail or prison for providing gender-affirming health care to minors and adults.
Lawmakers supporting these bills refer to transgender people’s lives as a “woke social experiment” or “left-wing gender insanity.” Partly because of this rhetoric, trans and gender-expansive people are disproportionately targeted by violence, both inside and outside the criminal justice system. Transgender people are more than four times more likely than others to be the victims of violent crime, according to one study, and are more commonly targeted by sexual assaults in prisons and jails. Amid the noise of the latest culture war, we rarely hear the voices of trans people themselves, especially those who are incarcerated. So we gathered their voices from prisons around the country, conducting interviews over the phone, via video visitation and through Plexiglas in a prison visiting room.
We also commissioned artist Chris Cortez to draw portraits of each person as they would want to be seen if they had more agency over their appearance: what jewelry, makeup, clothing and hairstyle they would choose if they were not incarcerated.
A major takeaway: When prison systems refuse to let trans people live authentically and safely as themselves, that refusal becomes part of their punishment. Continue reading >>>
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