The prison system wasn’t created to allow non-conformity in any way. This week, we visit San Quentin State Prison, a men’s facility in California, where among the almost 4,000 incarcerated men live a small group of incarcerated women. We later talk with Laverne Cox about her role as Sophia and lessons learned along the way. Learn more about the Poussey Washington Fund and get involved at www.Crowdrise.com/PWF
The prison system wasn’t created to allow non-conformity in any way. This week, we visit San Quentin State Prison, a men’s facility in California, where among the almost 4,000 incarcerated men live a small group of incarcerated women. We later talk with Laverne Cox about her role as Sophia and lessons learned along the way.
Learn more about the Poussey Washington Fund and get involved at www.Crowdrise.com/PWF
[Music]
Sophia: You heard of James Baldwin? James Baldwin was a writer, and black, and gay, and… Back when I was at my lowest, when I wasn’t sure I wanted to live, I read a quote of his and it stayed with me: “Freedom is not something anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take. And people are as free as they want to be.”
[Music]
Piper: This is From Where She Stands, a podcast connecting the storylines of Orange Is the New Black with stories from real women whose lives have been impacted by prison. I’m your host, Piper Kerman.
[Music]
Piper: Episode 3: (Trans)formation. The voice you just heard was Sophia Burset played by Laverne Cox. Sophia’s character is fun, generous, and will style your hair for a can of Pepsi. Sophia was a presence, one felt, wherever she went. Like, when she was showing other incarcerated women the beauty of the female anatomy.
(Clip from Orange is the New Black)
Female: I thought you said it was a whole other hole.
Female: It’s a whole in a hole.
Sophia: For the love of God girls, the whole is not inside the hole. You have your vagina proper and you have your clitoris. The urethra is located between the clit and the vagina inside the labia minora.
Female: For real?
Sophia: For real.
(Clip from Orange Is the New Black ends)
Piper: But, as a trans woman in Litchfield’s Women’s Prison, she was also confronted with a lot of bias and violence.
(Clip from Orange is the New Black)
Sophia: What you got between your legs is your business and what I got is mine.
Female: We just want a little peek. Educate ourselves.
[Music]
Sophia: Get the fuck out of my house.
Female: Not ‘til we see it.
[Music]
(Clip from Orange Is the New Black ends)
Piper: Okay. So, this is what I learned when I was in prison. If you’re able to find your people, that’s something you hold onto. The folks around you become security. Your people become your family. And for the trans women incarcerated in American prisons, if they can lean on each other, that’s essential.
Lisa: I hated this prison when I got here. I have 25 years in for a burglary. Three strikes. And I had spent 10 years at Vacaville before I came here. So, when I got here, it just seemed like, all these men, they think they’re this. They think they’re that. And then here I come and I didn’t know where I fit in.
Piper: That’s Lisa Strawn. She’s incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison in Northern California. It’s a medium security prison, just over 4,000 men. The death row area, that’s maximum security. You can see it from the courtyard.
Lisa: I walk around with this like, male street thing. It’s like, don’t play with me. And a lot of people will say, ‘Why don’t you smile more?’ Why? Walks around and does this all day. I don’t walk around like that.
Piper: Lisa’s tall. She has long blonde hair, dark mascara, and wears a light blue uniform that she French tucks into her baggie prison-issued pants.
Lisa: And so, I think just how I carry myself. I pay attention to my surroundings. Everywhere I go, I look around me. There are a lot of people that I know that don’t care for transgenders. And that’s okay too because I don’t care.
Piper: Lisa says she’s the oldest of the trans women here. And over the years she’s seen a lot of stuff change. One of the good changes is being able to walk out of her cell fully made up.
Lisa: I like coming out like this every day because for 23 years I was always told, ‘Go take that makeup off.’ Now, you all can’t say nothing to me if I want to come out with nine pounds of makeup on.
Piper: There are smaller changes like being able to buy women’s bras from the prison vendors. It’s these small things that she can do to feel more her, more feminine. Those are the things that make her smile a lot.
Lisa: It’s great. Oh, it’s great. I rock it. [laughs]
Piper: Today there’s a group that’s meeting. It’s called Acting with Compassion and Truth. The group focuses on increasing empathy and decreasing violence against LGBTQ folks in prison. Lisa sits front and center with about 20 people. Each is going around introducing themselves with their preferred pronouns.
Egypt: My name is Egypt. I go by Egypt here.
Piper: Egypt is another trans woman here. She comes to this meeting on the regular. Egypt’s been in San Quentin for over two years. She says she’s all about being on the outs. She’ll be released this year. So, for her, it’s all about not getting into any trouble and passing the time making music.
Egypt: [singing and snapping fingers] I know what I gotta do. Yeah. I know what I gotta do. Yeah. I’m low and they come to you. Now that I know the truth, man, there’s no excuse. Yeah. I know what I got to do.
Egypt: So, once I got off the bus, there was a lot of challenges. A girl coming in. She’s newly transitioning. I had no idea about anything with the system dealing with transgender women. And I didn’t even know where to begin. I mean, mind you, I’m five-ten, 135 pounds wet. So, you can just imagine how big I am. So, automatically I have this fear inside of me. All these stories I heard about San Quentin. I felt like I was going to walk into a war zone. [begins to sing and snap fingers] You all, my life was complicated. Growing up a foster child, I was deviated. Sign language all round, gang affiliated. Now I’m in this transition bound to be hated from the servants who a lady, I’m just saying. Yeah. I know what I got to do.
Piper: Egypt’s confidence is something that a lot of people notice. But she wasn’t always so confident. And it’s not the fact that she can wear makeup or order proper clothing. It’s not her access to hormones either. She says it’s the moments that have nearly broken her down that have made her.
Egypt: I think people don’t understand how much courage it takes to be a transgender woman, or be a transgender in general. How much courage it takes, how much energy it takes every morning to wake up.
Piper: For many trans women, this battle starts on day one of their prison sentence. Lisa remembers when she was first admitted.
Lisa: When you have trans women who live in H Unit which is dorms, and you have those who live in West Block and North Block.
Piper: These blocks are basically groups of cells big enough for a bunk bed and a toilet. At San Quentin, some prisoners can request a single cell, meaning request to live alone. But whether that’s granted depends on a lot of things like the length of the sentence, any history of assault, mental illness, gender dysphoria, and a list of other things that could put someone at risk to be victimized. But ultimately, it’s up to who’s in charge and what space is available.
Lisa: I didn’t want to come here, have to live with anybody.
Piper: Last year a memo was released for California prisons. It told the wardens to inform the staff to respect the use of pronouns and to try to use gender-neutral language when addressing people, like to call them ‘Inmate Jones’ or ‘Inmate Smith.’ The memo reads: “Repeatedly calling a transgender inmate by the wrong pronouns after an inmate has provided notice of his or her transition is inappropriate.” Some guidelines were needed because in prison, it’s common for staff of other prisoners to call trans prisoners by the name they were assigned at birth, not the one they’ve chosen. It’s called deadnaming. It’s dehumanizing and it's intended to be. Privacy? That’s a major issue for a woman’s body in a men’s prison. Egypt says she’s felt it.
Egypt: I knew I was going to have to face being in a cell with one sooner or later. In a small, small cell, having to get dressed, having to come back from showers, having to live my life as a woman still in front of men every day and being ridiculed or being liked or being sexualized.
Piper: Housing, showering, these things are daily struggles for a lot of trans prisoners. In San Quentin, a lot of the women shower around the same time. But this isn’t always allowed in other prisons.
Nick: When they want to go shower, they had to comply with the standards for all the [unintelligible 00:09:30] men in the facility which is a towel around your waist and no t-shirt on.
Piper: That’s attorney Nick Kincaid from the Legal Aid Society. They’ve been helping trans women navigate their incarceration.
Nick: So, that meant that basically, their upper body was completely on display. And we would hear reports that they would be walked, especially long distances to the showers so that everyone at the facility would see their breasts.
Piper: The reality is that trans prisoners have not been at the top of the list of priorities for a lot of prison officials.
[Music begins]
Piper: One study found that trans women in men’s prisons in California were 13 times more likely to be sexually abused than other prisoners. And it wasn’t until fairly recently, in 2003, that the Federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, what you’ll hear some refer to as PREA was passed. PREA is a set of federal standards to prevent sexual abuse. It includes language to protect those assaulted, a way for prisoners to file complaints, and the right to cover up in the showers. The reality though is that not all prisons care to follow these rules. Some simply don’t and opt to pay a fine. No American prison has yet been closed for failing to meet standards that keep people safe or treat them humanely.
Egypt: How do you talk about ideas of respect for gender identity and expression in facilities that ultimately are not made to do that and have no actual interest in doing that. Did go as against the very grain of them to say, oh, these are people and they have rights. And they have dignity. And they should be intimately involved in decisions about their life.
Piper: For women like Egypt, she says, sometimes you just have to take it into your own hands.
Egypt: I walk by and a man touched my ass. And in my head, I could have reacted and went back to my angry days and snapped and blacked out and came in here on another assault case, right? But instead, I took a second to think and I said, no. What could I do differently? What went through his mind? How can I put myself in his shoes? What did he go through? What is he thinking about when he sees me, right? So, he sees a woman. He probably ain’t seen a woman in 20 years. It’s an older gentleman. And he sees me and wants to sexualize me. And he sees me walking around, walking a certain way. So, in his mind, he maybe was taught or domesticated to think if a woman is walking that way, then she wants to be touched. Or maybe I was paying women on the street. And maybe she’s a whore. Maybe she’s prostitution.
So, until I open my mouth and I stopped him and I told him, you know, I could have broke your face when you touched my ass. But instead of doing that, I’m going to teach you a lesson. So, I brought him to the side and he was just like, scared. He was petrified because he didn’t ever think a reaction was going to happen. He accepted a slap or a punch or me to go get somebody. But I said, I asked him, “What is your name?” He told me his name. And I said, “Would you want somebody to touch your mother or your grandmother like that?” And he just looked like, what? No. I said, exactly. There’s lines, you know, there’s levels to the shit as, you know, Big Sean would say. I didn’t call PREA and I won’t do that.
Piper: So, Egypt knows very well that filing a grievance can mean being labeled a snitch and that could make prison unbearable. For some, it can mean being put into protective custody away from the general population. But protective custody is sometimes really solitarily confinement, or “the hole.” This happened in Orange Is the New Black when Laverne Cox’s character Sophia where she was put into protective custody in solitary.
(Clip from Orange Is the New Black)
Sophia: You’ve got to get me out of here.
Male: Well, turning your cell into a Russian bath is not helping your case. Flooding is a punishable offense. You should know that.
Sophia: How else was I supposed to get your attention?
Male: You can ask for me.
Sophia: Are you kidding me? I’ve been shouting your name for a month.
(Clip from Orange Is the New Black ends)
Piper: Sophia’s storyline, that removal from the general population reflects real life for many trans women in prison. Again, Nick Kincaid:
Nick: Protective custody assumes that all things you need to be protected from are happening in general population. So, they’re assuming almost entirely that risks posed to you are being posed by other incarcerated people. And for our transgender non-conforming people, a lot of risks are actually being posed by the correctional officers, by civilian staff, by individuals who are not incarcerated.
Piper: In seg, prisoners are often kept in a small cell for 23 hours a day, meals delivered through a slot in the door, lights often kept on at all times.
Nick: The reality is that in most facilities, the protective custody units are treated very similar if not the same to disciplinary solitary. And so, most people view it as being some form of punishment.
Piper: Being in prison can make you weak. It can make you strong. It can be the ultimate test of will. I remember when I was in prison, I had a neighbor. In my book, I talk about a trans woman named Vanessa. Vanessa was beautiful, poised, elegant, and kind. And she had a million stories. There was a group of young girls who would follow her around like ducklings, who idolized her in a way. So, yeah. There was some solidarity. But there were also a lot of women who were outraged that she was incarcerated with them. I noticed how often Vanessa had to maintain her composure under a lot of pressure above and beyond what we were all dealing with. For people like Lisa or Egypt who are living in a men’s prison, would they want to be in a women’s prison? Here’s Egypt:
Egypt: I identify as a woman. Every day I wake up, I feel like a woman. You know? And I look around and I see men. So, would I want to be in a woman’s prison? And after going through different scenarios and different pros and cons of it all, you know, and even though in stories of like, other girls going, I said no. I would not ever want to be in a woman’s prison.
Piper: And Lisa:
Lisa: I don’t really even see gender as an issue. I don’t see that as an issue because I know who I am. And I know who these men are. But I’m just-, I’m in a man’s prison and I’m doing the same thing they’re doing. I’m doing time. I’m doing really amazing things in prison and out of prison. And that’s it. That’s it. So, whether I’m in a man’s prison or a woman’s prison, what difference will it make?
[Music]
Piper: Sitting inside the prison, Lisa holds her head high. She smiles a lot. She winks when she’s being witty. She talks about how she’s found some sense of normalcy, as much as she can being in San Quentin. She doesn’t live in a single cell anymore. She shares a cell with her boyfriend, something they requested and were granted.
Lisa: Now, I haven’t lived with anyone for 11 years. And he’s never lived with a transgender. So, it’s-, seven weeks into it, it’s like, okay. You need some space? I got you. But we’re not up under each other because I don’t want that. What woman wants a man up under her all day. Really? I have stuff to do. Okay? I’m the-, I’m a socialite. I like to move around and see what’s going on and all the activities in the prison. Because I want to participate because I’m part of this prison.
Egypt: [singing] Now, I’m this transition vowed to be hated from the servants who a lady, I’m just saying. Yeah. I know what I gotta do. Yeah. I know what I gotta do. I’m humble when it come to you. Since you sacrifice for me, I do the same for you. [laughs] Yeah.
Piper: We’ve watched the character Sophia Burset go through so much in her time at Litchfield on Orange Is the New Black. From credit card scamming to fund her transition to being put in solitary confinement. I wanted to see how Laverne approached her portrayal of Sophia. But also, how that portrayal affected her views as an advocate for the trans community.
[Music]
Piper: Hello, Laverne.
Laverne: Hello, Piper.
Piper: It’s so good to hear your voice.
Laverne: It’s so weird calling you Piper because—
Piper: It’s so good to talk to you.
Laverne: …I’m-, I’m used to calling Taylor Shilling ‘Piper.’ [laughs] Or Chapman. And so, I’m like, wait. This is the real Piper. Okay.
Piper: Yep. Taylor’s got a couple inches on me. So, I’m curious what the things are that you noticed that you had in common with Sophia as you began to think about how to bring Jenji Kohan’s words to life from the page.
Laverne: So, my job as an actor is to find the connection, but then to also be clear about what’s different. I’ve never been incarcerated. I have never been married to a woman or any-, I’ve never been married to anyone. And I don’t have children. But I do have a relationship with my mother. And so much of the way I endowed the relationship between Sophia and Michael, Sophia’s son, was my relationship with my mother and her love for me and her willingness to really do anything to sacrifice for me. And I’ve certainly been in love before and have disappointed people that I’ve been in love with and who have loved me.
But then, also there is the piece of me needing to do what I have to do for my own self-actualization, for my own survival. That, I feel, I have very much in common with Sophia, Sophia’s decision to commit credit card fraud to finance her transition. Luckily, I didn’t have to do anything illegal to finance mine. Well… [laughs] Maybe I didn’t get-, I didn’t go to jail for anything. So… [laughs] So, yeah. Doing what one has to do to survive is something that I very much have in common with Sophia. And in discrimination in healthcare that she experienced. That first season being denied hormones, something I’ve experienced. Being, sort of, ostracized by other prisoners, harassed, physical violence. Some of the things that Sophia’s experienced, I’ve certainly experienced. So, there’s a lot of parallels. And there are a lot of things that are very different about Sophia and me.
Piper: Yeah. That point about doing whatever it takes to survive. You know, we see that in many of the storylines in Orange Is the New Black. But Sophia’s storyline really has a lot of proving ground. And some of the most difficult realities of prison life are things that this character, Sophia Burset, has endured. How did you tackle those incredibly difficult and heartbreaking storylines? And, you know, Sophia, of course, like so many LGBTQ people in prisons and jails everywhere in America is forced into solitary confinement and suffers devastating effects. And that’s just, really, one example of all the different proving grounds that this character has to endure.
Laverne: Yeah. I mean, I think what is, sort of, remarkable about Sophia is that she’s actually incarcerated in a woman’s prison. Most of the trans women who were incarcerated are incarcerated in a men’s prisons all over the world. And that makes us, of course, way more likely to experience sexual assault in prison. There’s an FBI study that I read many years, about seven years ago. So, I bet these stats may have changed. When I was doing research that trans women are 13 times more likely than other inmates to be sexually assaulted in prison. And I think that’s partly because if you’re a woman in a men’s prison, you’re probably more likely as a woman in a man’s prison to be sexually assaulted.
Prison is prison I’ve learned over the years. And so, where you’re incarcerated isn’t necessarily like, you know, you’re still in jail. That’s what CeCe McDonald said to me. I had the privilege of executive producing a documentary called Free CeCe that is now available on iTunes and Amazon and YouTube where I got to talk to a transwoman, CeCe McDonald, who we interviewed her while she was incarcerated. She was incarcerated in St. Cloud, Minnesota. And she was in prison for defending herself against a racist and transphobic attack that happened, oh, my gosh, in 2011. And she spent 19 months of a 41 months prison sentence in a men’s prison. And so, what CeCe said about her experience is that it doesn’t matter if I’m in a men’s prison or a woman’s prison, I’m still in jail.
I thought about CC a lot when I was, particularly, that first year of shooting Orange Is the New Black. And having the opportunity to get to know her, interview her, talk to her about her experience has certainly influenced a lot of the ways in which I approach the character, particularly in the second season and on. And she experienced being placed in solitary confinement multiple times during her incarceration. During-, before she went to trial, she found herself in solitary confinement. She talked about feeling suicidal. That particular storyline for me was really intense and really difficult.
It’s actually the first time. I have an acting coach. And I kind of prepared everything on my own for the first few seasons. And then when the solitary confinement narrative came, I think it was in the fourth season, I knew that I needed help. I did a bunch of research and reading about psychological and emotional effects of solitary confinement and the fact that people often become suicidal after just a few days in solitary. The sense of loss of time and what-not. So, I called my acting coach, Brad Calcaterra at the time, and we worked on some very specific behavior and subtexts for those scenes and those moments to try to make it as real and as authentic as possible.
Human beings crave connection and belonging. We’re social, you know, creatures. And to be completely, sort of, cut off from having connections with other people is fundamentally against the nature of who human beings are.
Piper: So, there are 700,000 people coming home from prison or jail every single year in this country. And many of them are trans and non-binary people, LGBTQ people. What do you wish for those folks coming home? What would you want their first few days of freedom to be like?
Laverne: I would wish them love. I think love is deeply healing. And what’s deep to me about this question, of course, I always think about CeCe. The interesting thing about CeCe’s story that a lot of trans people, non-binary people, people who are getting released from prison in general don’t have is that there was a movement that formed to free CeCe.
Her community in Minneapolis, Minnesota acknowledged that her incarceration was about a system that did not value the lives of people of color, a system that did not value the lives of trans people. That this young woman was defending herself. She fought for her life on June 5, 2011 against someone who had a swastika tattoo on his chest and who had threatened her life. And so, a community of activists formed in support of CeCe while she was incarcerated.
And so, there was a tremendous amount of support on the outside that a lot of people don’t have. And CeCe’s life post-prison has not been easy by any stretch of the imagination. It’s been quite difficult. But the first few days that she was out, I witnessed, and she might have a different experience with this. But what I saw is a tremendous amount of love and support. And there was something really beautiful about that. And this spirit, this personality, her intelligence helped to form a movement around her freedom.
And so, I think we all need a certain level of love and support. And then also, we need resources when we get out of prison as well. How do we, as a culture… And you probably know this better than I do because you’re really in this work. How do we begin to-, for people who don’t have certain levels of privilege like you have had, when they get out of prison, how do we give them their humanity back? And ideally, we shouldn’t strip them of their humanity while they’re incarcerated. That would be a start. When we can dehumanize people, then it becomes a way to dismiss them, to disenfranchise them, and to just discard them. And people who are incarcerated, who were formally incarcerated are so often deeply dehumanized in this culture. And I mean, I hope our show has done some work to challenge that.
Piper: I wonder, because you have inspired so many people with your own assertion of self in the way that you have discovered yourself over the course of all of your life experiences, what words of advice you might give to both currently or formerly incarcerated LGBTQ people about standing in their own shoes and discovering their own happiness, and continuing to find that sense of agency, even in the face of so many adversities that we’ve been talking about?
Laverne: I don’t honestly feel qualified to give advice to someone who’s been incarcerated. I’ve never been incarcerated. I think what I’ve learned, spending a lot of time with CeCe is that we are both black trans women, but our experiences are really, really different. And I think sometimes giving advice from-, without acknowledging the extent to which you are privileged can be really problematic.
What I’m very aware of is that, as a black transgender woman who, you know, was on a really popular television show and then placed on magazine covers. And, you know, all of a sudden, I’m on red carpets and I’m traveling the country doing speeches. I feel like this system, the existing system often will pick someone, pick, you know, one or two people from marginalized groups and say, oh, this person can, sort of, succeed and achieve.
And so, this means anyone can do it. And those kinds of narratives don’t acknowledge the levels of privilege that someone like me has even though I was in [unintelligible 00:28:38] and I come from a working-class background and all… There’s a certain levels of privilege because of my education and because I got to study, you know, with wonderful acting teachers and ballet teachers when I was growing up. And that’s a lot of privilege. You do what you do to survive. And then, I think it’s also about trying to be able to be in your integrity when you do it.
[Music]
Piper: So, we’ve been thinking a lot about things we can do outside of prison walls. One thing we’ve done is launched the Poussey Washington Fund. The money raised from this fund will go to help eight organizations fighting to end the epidemic of mass incarceration of women in America. When you donate, you’ll contribute to the fight for criminal justice reform, immigration rights, and helping women integrate back into the wider community after their sentences. To join us, you can visit crowdrise.com/pwf.
[Music]
Piper: Next episode we’ll talk about giving birth when you’re a prisoner. And we’ll hear from actress Dascha Polanco.
Dascha: I am a child of an incarcerated parent. And playing a mother incarcerated and having to give up their child, not only was it complex but there was so many emotional barriers for me.
Piper: Re(birth). That’s next week.
[Music]
Piper: From Where She Stands is a production of Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios. From Netflix, our executive producers are Nia Lee, Torie Gleicher, and Brook Rees. From Orange Is the New Black, executive producers are Jenji Kohan, Tara Hermann, and myself, Piper Kerman. This series was created by Pineapple Street Studios. Executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman, Max Linsky, and Leila Day. The senior producer is Leila Day with lead producer Josh Gwynn and producer Justine Daum. Production assistants from the incredible Jessica Jupiter and Sophie Bridges. Our sound engineer is James Rowlands. Music throughout the episode is by Salami Rose. Special thinks to Lieutenant Sam Robinson at San Quentin State Prison, Taylor Brown from Lambda Legal, Nick Kincaid and Dori Lewis from the Legal Aid Society. I’m Piper Kerman. Thanks for listening.
[End of audio]