Trans rights behind bars

For the Hearts on a Wire Collective, a grassroots movement to support transgender people in and out of prison, the fate of their fall 2013 newsletter seemed proof that logic was lost in Pennsylvania's correctional system.

A member reported that the newsletter, a compendium of drawings, poems, essays, homegrown legal advice, and obituaries, was confiscated at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) Fayette - because it contained "information regarding the manufacture of explosives, incendiaries, weapons, escape devices or other contraband."

The offending article? A recipe for lip gloss using materials scrounged from the cafeteria and purchased at the commissary.

It's often about the small battles for Hearts on a Wire, which counts as members an "outside collective" of transgender and gender-variant volunteers in Philadelphia, and an "inside collective" of 100 inmates across the state in 22 institutions, and 150 more across the country. Members publish the quarterly newsletter, coordinate bare-bones support for inmates upon release, and advocate for transgender people's rights - right down to their access to cosmetics.

"It may sound like a small issue, but the ability to be who you are, even at the level of [wearing lip gloss], is such an important aspect of self-care in a hostile environment," said Adrian Lowe, a collective member and a staff attorney at the AIDS Law Project in Philadelphia.

In the last year or two, this cause has been made more visible by the case of Chelsea Manning, the transgender Army private who leaked classified information and is now incarcerated in a military men's prison, and by the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, in which transgender actress Laverne Cox fights for access to hormone therapy.

But that hasn't eased the extraordinary challenges transgender people face in prison, including neglect, discrimination, isolation, and victimization - for example, transwomen are almost always placed in men's prisons, and vice versa for transmen. A 2007 California study found sexual assault was 13 times more prevalent among transgender inmates.

The collective started informally in 2007, when a few activists decided to gather as much contact information as they could for transgender inmates, and send each a valentine. When the inmates responded, the letter-writing campaign turned into an ongoing activist effort.

The issues facing such inmates are numerous, said Najee Gibson of Philadelphia, who first engaged with Hearts on a Wire as an inmate and continued as an activist after leaving prison.

"There's health issues, parole issues, housing issues, expressing-yourself issues. Abuse: staff- and inmate-wise, mental and physical," Gibson said.

On one occasion, Gibson, who grew up as a boy but now prefers the pronoun they rather than he or she, tells of being transferred from one men's prison to another in the middle of the night, perhaps to end a romantic relationship or in retribution for filing copious grievances. Then there was the day-to-day demoralization: Gibson's underwear was repeatedly confiscated because Gibson had dyed it pink with commissary Kool-Aid.

Underlying many of these issues is the fact that inmates are often housed according to their gender assigned at birth; attorney Lowe has encountered only one inmate in seven years who was not.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), for which the U.S. Justice Department issued long-awaited rules in 2012, mandates that prisoners' safety concerns, not merely their anatomy, be considered in determining whether to put them in a men's or women's prison. But Angus Love of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project noted that there's no enforcement mechanism. "There's no real teeth in that act," he said.

The state and the Philadelphia Prison System have both updated their policies in line with the act. But the issue brings complications: In 2012, a transwoman, who in a rare case was placed in a women's prison in Philadelphia, accused a male guard of sexually assaulting her. After the details of the case emerged, her former cellmates sued the city for celling them with a man. The city settled.

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections press office declined to comment on questions submitted for this article. In response to a right-to-know request, the department said data on housing and treatment of transgender inmates were not available.

For now, Hearts on a Wire is focused on the low-hanging fruit: advocating for the same commissary access in men's and women's prisons.

"Our argument is, if mascara is not a weapon in the women's prison, then it's not a weapon in the men's prison. It doesn't become weaponized," Lowe said. "If long hair is not a safety or health concern in one prison, it shouldn't be in the other."

One day, they hope to address more dire concerns, including what they've heard from inmates is uneven access to prescribed hormone therapy.

One member was allowed to have hormone therapy only if she was willing to submit to solitary confinement at SCI Dallas, a men's prison, Lowe said. She chose to be in the general population and detransitioned as a result.

But in and out of prison, maintaining continuity remains a challenge.

Inside, transgender inmates get transferred frequently between institutions, Lowe said. Some members of the collective join, then get reincarcerated. Others have to move out of town to find work, or find that hearing inmates' stories is just too traumatizing, Lowe said.

Leaving prison is also a challenge, since trans people often face family rejection. Most Hearts on a Wire members serve their maximum sentences, unable to find approved home plans for parole.

The collective's correspondence provides a virtual community. For those held in administrative custody, which is essentially solitary confinement, it may be the only one they have.

"Hearts on a Wire gave me others who share my concerns and they give me strength to hang in there," said Susie Moon, born Kerry, of SCI Rockview, in a letter to The Inquirer.

She said the reason she was in prison, drug addiction, stemmed from the pain of hiding her gender identity.

Now, Moon wrote, "I don't hide who I am, as I did that most of my life, hiding behind drugs."

Winter Dickerson, born Eugene, said men's prison is a perilous place for a transwoman. She wrote to The Inquirer from SCI Dallas, where she is imprisoned for offenses including aggravated assault, prostitution, and retail theft.

"You have to deal with name-calling from staff and inmates alike, and you have to guard yourself against sexual predators," she wrote. "There is a rash of assaults on transwomen here that gets swept under the rug."

Lowe said trans inmates employ a variety of survival strategies, including hiding their identities, seeking out a protector, or requesting a single cell, despite the isolation that can bring.

Jordan Gwendolyn Davis, a Hearts on a Wire member in Philadelphia, thinks change at the state level will take time, but Philadelphia has the chance to lead the way.

"In our homeless shelter system in Philadelphia, we have transwomen in women's shelters. I know: I was one of them. So why not take the next step and have that in the prison system?" she said. "The prison system is still the outlier."

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