4 May 8 - 14, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents J asmyn Flores was in the lieuten- ant’s office with three male guards. A thin layer of perspira- tion glued loose flyaways of her long, dark hair to her forehead. Her heart palpitated, beating against the rough cotton of a man’s prison uni- form labeled FCI Seagoville. She was scared and desperate to return to her holding center in Building 6, staring into the sneering faces of the guards. Flores had accidentally missed the alarm, which ended the recreational yard time, and found herself mistak- enly trapped in another building. She anticipated a reprimand, hoping for a slap on the wrist. Instead, she said, she was humiliated and dehumanized, used as a circus sideshow act for the of- ficers’ entertainment. They taunted her, forcing her to deepen her voice one octave after the other. They teased her, challenging her to lower her tone until it reached baritone pitches. “Why do you sound like a real woman?” they mocked her unrelent- ingly until she lowered her voice to un- natural levels, hoping appeasing their wishes would mean her return to safety The officers called in a female lieu- tenant, a “real” woman by their stan- dards, to compare their voices. Flores’ eyes were wet, pricked with tears of humiliation and frustration. After what felt like hours of mortification, with her head hung low, Flores was allowed to go back to her housing unit with an unactionable anger coursing through her. Flores returned to the place where she will live until her 2026 release date, in the general population holding unit at FCI (Federal Correctional Institute) Seagoville, a low-security prison in North Texas for male inmates. “They were misgendering me the entire time,” she said, her voice break- ing as she relived it. “They were ques- tioning how long [ago] I had transitioned, how I was able to [change] my voice. Things that were not ... they didn’t have to do anything with what I was called there in the first place. I just felt very humiliated, very much so.” Flores came out to her family and friends at 12 and started wearing makeup, like many other young girls, at 13. By 15, she had legally changed her name, and at 17, she started taking estrogen. Now, at 22, Flores has lived much of her life as a woman. De- spite her government-issued identification indicating that she is a woman, identifying as a woman and presenting as a woman, Flores, along with a couple of dozen other transgender women, is jailed with men. The women of Seagoville men’s prison are vulnerable to random searches by male officers, stripped of crucial gender-affirming care, penalized for gathering together and misgendered for the sake of cruelty. It wasn’t always this way. Flores has spent time housed with women before, but since a long-winded executive order from the pen of President Donald Trump promised to re- store biological truth to the federal govern- ment, incarcerated transgender women have been the exception to the standard pro- tection from cruel and unusual punishment. Flores’ Story W hen Flores was arrested in March 2022 for transporting immigrants across the southern border, she was placed in the female tank at Val Verde County Detention Facility, where she lived for 35 days before being released on bond. In that time, Flores never had an issue with an- other inmate. She says she was a model pris- oner and enjoyed the camaraderie and support of the women she was with. But when she was arrested a second time before the election in 2024, Flores was treated dif- ferently. “I had to be made to go back to that same facility, and they immediately put me into the SHU,” she said. SHU stands for Special Housing Unit, or solitary confinement. “It took a day or two for me to finally say, ‘Please, I don’t want to be here. Why can’t I be placed in the female unit?’” Flores said the officers told her that they didn’t realize she was transgender in 2022 and that the little more than a month she had spent in the women’s tank had been a mistake. Flores was placed in the SHU this time while guards determined what to do with her next. Since 2018, standard protocol has called for inmates to be housed in a prison that aligns with their assigned gender at birth. “We can’t place somebody like you in a female pod,” they told her. After sentencing and transfer, Flores was moved to Seagoville on Nov. 14, 2024, nine days after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. She ex- pected taunts and misgendering from the other inmates; she knew as a mi- nority member, a large target would be placed on her back, but she held onto faith for protection from systemic abuse. But on Jan. 20, on the first day of his presidency, Trump dealt a cataclys- mic blow to transgender federal pris- oners under the name “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOL- OGY EXTREMISM AND RESTOR- ING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.” The all-caps memo strictly outlines sex as “an individual’s immutable bio- logical classification as either male or female” based on gender at conception and “ensure[s] that no Federal funds are expended for any medical proce- dure, treatment, or drug for the pur- pose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” Flores says a memo was plastered on the home screen of the computers accessible to all inmates. That’s how she and the entire prison population found out transgender inmates were required to hand over their prison-pro- vided undergarments. “I remember walking to [the] laun- dry with my bras and panties in hand and seeing [correction officers] and seeing male inmates laughing at me,” she said. “And I asked the other girls here if they experienced the same thing. And yes, they said the same thing that they had people laugh at them. It was humorous to see us. We were a joke, basically.” Flores, like many transgender in- mates, through the use of estrogen, has grown breasts, which will not reduce in size even if hormone replacement therapy is delayed. Some of the women have had breast augmentations before sentencing. Though they were allowed to keep any specially ordered undergarments available through the prison catalog, pur- chased for an additional fee, women without means to buy them are left with nothing, forced to bear the imprints of their chests in a men’s prison in the thin, rough and taut cotton of a constrictive man’s uniform de- signed for a flat chest. Taking away prison-issued bras and panties was just the first step in transgender erasure, Flores said. “If you just take away things to make our time harder, well, now you’re just being very cruel and [making] serving our time harder than it needs to be,” she said. “We’re already incarcerated. And then taking these CRUEL INTENTIONS Transgender women in federal prison are housed with men, stripped of their identity and subjected to harrassment following Trump’s executive orders. BY ALYSSA FIELDS Illustration by Yifat Fishman | UNFAIR PARK | >> p6
