“Trans Bodies, Trans Selves,” a basic trans health resource, is explicitly banned from prisons in eight states.
The rampant banning of texts about queer and transgender people has been in the news a lot recently, but nowhere is book banning more of an issue than in prison. Trans people, in particular, suffer from prisons’ arbitrary restrictions. Sophia Alexsandra Brett Laferriere, a trans woman living in a Washington state prison, toldvia the prison’s online messaging system, “Most of the information we ask for doesn’t get to us, or staff steal it or write over it. They block it from us.
What’s more, these are the bans that can be tracked; according to the PEN report, about half the states do not keep a publicly available list of what books are banned, and many states do not require local prison officials to report up the chain of command what books have been refused.
LGBT Books to Prisoners organizer Sandy Olson says that, “It’s made our work a lot harder, and a lot more complicated.” Previously, Olson says, it was possible to train a new volunteer in 10-15 minutes, but “now it’s like the training is a lot more. And the organization load is a lot more, and that’s how oppression works, is just to make it increasingly difficult.
Of course, it is not always that easy. Allish in Michigan writes, “While they provide a legal library, they do not tell us how to use it properly. I spent many hours fumbling for answers with little to show for it.”
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