The Women of San Quentin: Soul Murder of Transgender Women in Male Prisons

by Kristin Schreier Lyseggen

True stories about nine transgender women in the male US prison system who grew up never feeling safe, who were surrounded by others telling them that they should be normal , and that their deepest sense of who they were was an error. As the number of transgender people coming out reaches levels we never before dreamed of, author Kristin Lyseggen hopes this book will shed some light on the needs of people locked up twice in their lives. She started writing this book as soon as she moved to California from Norway, just before we learned that Private Bradley Manning was Chelsea Manning and before we knew about the popular Netflix TV show Orange Is the New Black. In real life, most women with gender identity issues, when jailed, are put in male prisons with notorious predators. The only options for many of them in order to survive is to live isolated in cages, or become sex slaves for other inmates. For Kristin Lyseggen to understand the reality of their lives, she had to gain trust from people she had never met and never expected to meet. This book project led Kristin from the war zone in East Oakland, California, to the run-down, chaotic intensity of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco; she traveled from a boundary breaking Transgender Health Conference in Bangkok to a clandestine LGBTQI advocacy conference in Nairobi, Kenya; from an event to raise funds for incarcerated transgender women in Oakland where one speaker was ( former FBI s Most Wanted ) Angela Davis, a professor at University of California; to conservative Rome, Georgia and Montgomery, Alabama; to a maximum security prison in the Central Valley of California. Without exception the stories she encountered during this project were diverse and different from one another in ways that were surprising and often disturbing. Kristin was introduced to an almost inconceivable struggle heaped upon the usual stories of people incarcerated in US prisons. In spite of the conditions of their lives, they taught her that what landed them behind bars, and the contradictory feelings one has about their crimes, there could be the possibility of redemption.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Transgender

311 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2015

Reviews

[Kimchi Kong · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had powerful, personal stories of different transwomen in prison. I found it interesting how varied the experiences were among the different transwomen. Some were transwomen of color, another was a nazi and white supremacist before transitioning. Some live in horrific conditions of choosing between solitary confinement or sexual slavery in prison. Others have made comfortable lives for themselves in male prisons and did not seem to experience much harassment. While many of them wanted to be moved to a women's prison, others preferred to stay in the men's prison and mentioned previous cases of transwomen who were transferred to a women's prison and ended up raping some women there. That was something I didn't expect to read in this book and it certainly made me rethink the best way to end the abuse of transwomen in prison.

I wish the book could've gone into a bit more detail about their daily lives and experiences. Many of the accounts were overviews of their backgrounds and descriptions of their interviews. Also, the author was so painfully aware and apologetic about being a cis white woman that it got so annoying and came across as naïve and sheltered.

[A.M. Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't remember why I ordered this book (possibly referenced in an article I read a while ago) but I finally picked it up. And picking it up was a chore, because for some reason it was published* in a similar format to a textbook, which mean an unwieldy hardcover, thick paper pages, and weight that made my hands hurt. But the stories inside the covers was well worth it, detailing the lives of trans women incarcerated in mens' prisons, many of them max security regardless of the woman's actual crime.

*I read the hardcover edition, not Kindle, and I do recommend the Kindle version because the physical book is a brick.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm holding two things as I write this review: the need for transgender prisoners' stories and voices to be heard, and this author's positioning of herself at the center of their stories. My four-star review is a balance of the 5 stars I'd give the former and the 2 stars I'd give the latter. These people have powerful stories to share. The author exposes her naivete and newness to the U.S. carceral system at almost every page-turn. She editorializes the prisoners' stories with her own thoughts/feelings in a way that I did not appreciate. Their stories are told through her gaze. This kind of book makes me curious whether the women whose stories are central to it, and whose financial insecurity is palpable, receive any money from its publication and sales. I sure hope so, because without them this book would be simply one woman's tale of her own awakening to the hardships transpeople in U.S. jails and prisons face. That's a book I'm not interested in reading.

[Judah Jamison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was superbly researched - full of photos and letters from trans women to the author describing their incarceration experiences. Women in men's penitentiaries is a huge human rights issue, and the personal stories of these women are essential elements in our education.