Raven Navajo left the Clark County jail last week for a state prison system in which she will be one of only a few male-to-female transgender inmates, a prisoner taking daily estrogen doses in a world of caged men.
The prison decides where to place transgendered inmates — people who do not identify with or present themselves as their birth gender — depending on their genitals. If you have male genitals you’re imprisoned with men, no matter if you have artificially induced breasts, no matter if you consider yourself a woman and act like one.
It’s the same in most states, as well as in federal prisons. Nationally, the estimate is that transgendered inmates number in the low thousands. The actual population is unknown because it is not tracked by authorities.
Prison officials have historically feared that if they allow male-to-female transgendered inmates to bunk with women, inmates will pretend to be transgender just to be near women, said Alexander Lee, director of the San Francisco-based Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project. There’s also the fear that prisoners with male genitalia will impregnate female inmates.
As for simply keeping transgender inmates together and segregated from the rest of the prison population, Nevada doesn’t have enough of them for that. Officials can’t give them their own wing because those wings are built to hold dozens of prisoners, prison spokesman Greg Smith said. The crowded prison system doesn’t have the luxury of leaving any bunks empty.
The hairdresser who bleached Raven Navajo’s roots in jail wasn’t given much time or many tools, so the result was more mine shaft canary than blond — dingy yellow hair fried so thin it seemed to float on static electricity. The color clashed something awful with her blue jailhouse jumpsuit, an effect opposite of what Navajo had hoped for: Sitting in court, in her melted mascara and makeup-spackled skin, she still looked like a man.

lasvegassun.com


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