Sunday, September 13, 2015

My Worst Fears.

The stuff nightmares are made of… as a trans women being put into a men’s prison. We have all the non-discrimination laws that say our gender identity is our legal gender. Our driver license, Social Security, Medicare, passports, and shortly our birth certificates all will have our true gender, but is we are stopped and arrested we will be put in the prison on our birth gender. It doesn’t how many years ago you have transitioned, or how feminine or masculine you look you will be housed contrary to the law in a prison of you birth gender.

According to the survey “Injustice At Every Turn”
Physical and sexual assault in jail/prison is a serious problem: 16% of respondents who had been to jail or prison reported being physically assaulted and 15% reported being sexually assaulted.
It is a real fear that we have, so what is being done to protect us?
San Francisco jails to house transgender inmates based on gender preference
LA Times
By James Queally
September 10, 2015

By the end of the year, San Francisco's county jails will be among the first in the nation to house transgender inmates by their gender preference, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said Thursday.

Currently, San Francisco County puts transgender inmates in an isolated wing of its downtown jail facility. But under the policy announced Thursday, Mirkarimi said, he hopes to have transgender inmates living with their preferred population before 2016.

But transgender inmates who choose to remain in segregated housing or to continue living with other inmates who share the gender they were assigned at birth can do so, according to Kenya Briggs, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office.

 “I carry the perspective forward that the transgender population is marginalized on the streets of America," Mirkarimi said. "Consider how magnified that treatment is inside prisons and jails.”
According to the article California has a transgender prison population of 385 trans inmates.

This is a huge step forward that I hope other states will follow.

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