The Women of San Quentin

Soul Murder of Transgender Women in Male Prison

Between 2013 and 2015 writer and photographer Kristin Lyseggen got to know 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 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 option for many of them in order to survive is to live isolated in cages, or become sex slaves for other inmates. 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 conservative Rome, Georgia to Montgomery, Alabama and to a maximum security state 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.