'PTSD is real, I wake up crying': the activist who stood up to prison guard abuse
Tired of daily harassment and violence by prison guards, Rojas decided to fight back. The 39-year-old, who spent 15 years behind bars in California, said officers routinely tormented transgender and non-binary people, mocking their bodies, threatening sexual violence and sometimes physically assaulting them.
“We were sick of it. We weren’t going to let the officers abuse us any more,” said Rojas, who is gendernonconforming (GNC) and uses a single name. “We organized on the inside.”
In the final year of their sentence at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), the state’s largest women’s prison, Rojas began documenting their experiences, filing grievances and forcing the state to respond. Since their release in 2017, they have been a leader in an ongoing lawsuit accusing guards of civil rights violations, including attacking trans and GNC people; locking them in “isolation cages” in retaliation for their complaints; and denying them medical treatment. (A prison spokesperson declined to comment on Rojas’s claims, citing pending litigation.)
The Los Angeles-based activist also helped launch #MeToo Behind Bars, a campaign against gender discrimination and sexual violence, fighting for the people Rojas left behind – the oftforgotten transgender men and nonbinary and queer people housed in women’s prisons.
In the latest installment of the Guardian’s series on trans activists at the forefront of protest movements, we talked to Rojas about prison abolition, the Covid crisis, and standing up to officers who control every aspect of your life.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I know there are a lot of trans and queer people in California women’s prisons. Can you tell me a bit about this community behind bars?
There were so many queer folks and GNC and trans people inside. There were roughly 4,000 people incarcerated at CCWF, eight people in a room, and every room had at least two trans and GNC folks. There were even more queer folks. It’s crazy because we all come from the same communities. It felt like every queer person from these small communities ends up in prison. It’s then when you realize, damn, we’re targeted. It’s very revealing. How does that happen? How are so many of us incarcerated? We’ve all been through the worst of it, and if we don’t fight for us, there isn’t anyone else who is going to come. Nobody’s coming to save us. That’s why it has to be us fighting for us.
Those numbers are striking. Why do you think queer and trans people are so overrepresented in prison?
We are criminalized for being us. These are the people whose families have forgotten about them, whose families are not there for them, because they don’t accept them for being who they are. People have to understand that a lot of folks are there for survival crimes. They were hungry. They were getting beaten, and they were defending themselves. People need to stop looking at us like: “You’ve been to prison, you can’t be trusted, you don’t belong in society.” Trans, GNC and queer folks, especially if they are Black, are criminalized, and there is no winning in this system. It’s like we were thrown away by society.
Can you give me a sense of what life behind bars was like for you and others?
It is like we are not human, period. They constantly misgender us, and that hurts, but that is the least of our problems. They always want to humiliate us. Even the way they handcuff us. If you’re GNC or trans, they twist your arms back and it’s really painful. They make you bend over as they walk you across the yard. You’re the joke of the prison. Staff make fun of you. They talk about our bodies and ask us if we know what we are. They’ll joke about periods. They’ll dangle a tampon in front of you and taunt you. A male guard said he would show me what a “real man” was. I was threatened with rape, and then I was laughed at when I was scared. They would strip me and I’d be naked in a room with male officers. They parade you around. And we would get disciplined more than anyone else. We were abused in every way.
What impact did this have on you personally?
You feel shame. You want to keep it a secret. It’s hard to tell your family and each other, because you don’t want to be the punchline, you don’t want folks to hear about it. You just try to stay quiet so it goes away. But it doesn’t ever go away. A lot of folks inside have never had any type of therapy. So they get angry. It does something to you mentally. And I think about the times I didn’t speak up, listening to my friends cry and seeing what happened to them, and I feel like, damn, I should have said something about this. There are so many people that were incarcerated with me and we’re constantly apologizing to each other now, realizing we should have said something. Out here, at least there are spaces for us to talk about these things. PTSD is real. I still cry. I wake up crying at night. I have horrible dreams. Sometimes I’m daydreaming and tears are just rolling down my eyes, because of what I had to live with for so long.
How did you decide to start organizing? That must have been terrifying.
I didn’t decide to start organizing until my last year in prison, because I was so scared of retaliation. They can cut off all your lifelines – they stop your mail, rip up your pictures, it’s horrible. But after being in there for so long, I decided I was sick of it and I would blow the whistle and fight back, even if I had to go through retaliation. They do what they want with you. They come down hard. They’ll make you strip. They give you write ups. They discipline you. You literally have to let them abuse you. But we started organizing anyway. And we had a network of folks that supported us on the outside and helped us create #MeToo Behind Bars.
What tactics did you use when you actually organized with others inside?
You have to get super creative. You’re not allowed to be in groups of more than three or you can get in trouble. They can label you a gang. And so we had to figure out other ways to talk to each other. And a lot of us didn’t go to school, so sometimes we’d get a dictionary and figure out how to write our grievances together. We’d help one another, but in secrecy. You can’t let the officers know you’re organizing on the inside, because then everyone has to deal with retaliation. If you get caught, that’s it.
So you have to find new ways to keep it a secret. You have to meet in hidden places wherever you can, and figure out who can bring back messages. You have to trust each other. Sometimes you have to figure out how to talk without talking. I know that sounds so crazy, but you can see someone with a certain look and you know something has happened to them and you have to figure out what’s going on. Sometimes we can’t speak, but we know what those teary eyes mean.
You filed the lawsuit in 2017 – do you think the guards or the institution have changed at all?
Two of our plaintiffs are still incarcerated, and the case is stuck in litigation. We’re still waiting. But I’ve heard that other folks are speaking up or they are writing grievances or considering suing. I think more folks are empowered. That is a big deal, just to hear that folks want to sue, that they are going to fight back and stand up to retaliation – that is amazing. Sometimes when there is media attention around these cases, the officers will back down for a bit. But eventually they go back to their behaviors. It doesn’t matter. Or they’ll just change the way they attack you. Just because we’re exposing these institutions doesn’t mean it’s going to stop. They’re not just going to give up their power. This is going to be a long fight.
Beyond litigation, how do you protest and stop this kind of abuse?
It’s not going to be fixed with reform. There is no fixing this. We can’t keep these systems in place and just make them better. They are still going to be super violent. Gender-based violence isn’t going to end when you fire certain officers or put certain officers in jail. This is the system and this is how it works, and even if we change things a little bit, the problem is not going away. The violence comes from these systems. I hope people really start listening to the folks that have been through it, and start thinking about prison abolition – thinking of how we can better our communities without these systems. These prisons are supposed to “rehabilitate” you, but instead they just continuously punish you. There is no help.
Now that you’re out, what has it been like for you to watch the Covid-19 catastrophe in California’s prisons – to see thousands get infected and dozens lose their lives?
It exposes that they don’t give a shit. They’d rather leave people in there who have months left of their sentence and leave them at risk of dying. We ain’t shit to them. They don’t care about our lives. They’d rather take those last few months that they think we owe them. We don’t matter. The governor has to release more folks – folks who have two years left in their sentence, folks who have been imprisoned for 20 years, folks over 60, folks with medical conditions who could easily die. With more folks out, they could at least socially distance more on the inside, and folks could live. We wouldn’t have to talk about who lost their life today inside of prison.
How should people on the outside who are sympathetic to the experiences of incarcerated people get involved?
People should look up local organizations that do this work wherever they live. Find the closest one and ask what kind of support they need. And I hope people start to have these conversations at home, with their families. What would it be like if we didn’t have police? Beyond that, more people need to listen to our stories. There are hundreds of people saying the same thing as me. Believe us, like they did with the larger #MeToo movement when the public started believing women more. Us too. We deserve that. It’s so hard to change the narrative. People think we deserve this punishment, that we are liars. It’s time to give us a chance.
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The state declined to comment to the Guardian on Rojas’s specific claims.California has deniedtheir allegations in court, but a judge has ruled thatthe retaliation and excessive force claims in their case can move forward. An order is still pending on other charges, though a judge issued an initial recommendation that some sexual abuse claims be dismissed, arguing that “mere verbal sexual harassment” and incidents that cause “humiliation” may not rise to the level of constitutional violations.
Terry Thornton, a prison spokeswoman, said in an email that California has adopted policies to prevent sexual abuse and “create more respectful environments” for trans and non-binary prisoners. Guards are directed to use correct pronouns and allow trans people to access clothes that match their gender, she said, adding that the prison system has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment and retaliation.
In our Trans freedom fighters project, the Guardian is spotlighting the work of trans and non-binary movement leaders on the frontlines of 2020 organizing and activism. Read more stories here
These are the people whose families have forgotten about them, because they don’t accept them for being who they are