Review by Tamar Goelman
“I want to be a full-fledged woman of the United States of America, when all’s said and done.” These words, spoken with the soft-voiced drawl of a Southern belle, sum up the dreams of all the women featured in Janet Baus, Dan Hunt, and Reid Williams’ conventional yet compelling documentary, Cruel and Unusual. The speaker, Ashley, sits on a stool in the Arkansas Department of Corrections, where she is imprisoned for writing false checks. Her eyes dart flirtatiously between the camera and her knees as she tells the story of “a good girl gone bad,” as she puts it.
Ashley is one of five transgender women—all formerly or currently incarcerated in a men’s prison—profiled in Cruel and Unusual. Using the stories of these five individuals, as well as interviews with experts, the film explores the plight of transgender women who are exposed to gender violence because of their placement in men’s prisons despite their gender identification. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV defines gender identity disorder (or GID) as “identification with the opposite sex and the experience of considerable distress because of one’s actual [biological] sex.”
The women in the film were all born male yet have an overwhelming sense that they should actually be female. Linda Thompson, a deep-voiced bottle blonde with the eye makeup of Tammy Faye Bakker, recalls being only 3 years old and praying, “Dear God, when I wake up, that thing will not be there. I will look like Susie from across the street.” She says that she realized “right then that I was different from other little boys.”
Another woman featured in the film, Ophelia De’Lonte, reports, “I knew that I was different from the age of 7 . . . I was born a little girl, but in a little boy’s body. When I was able to dress and be me, I felt wonderful.” The filmmakers cut to seemingly archival footage of a little girl skipping rope while Ashley explains in a voice-over, “I liked playing with dolls, all the things that little girls did.” Anna Connelly recalls that she was caught with her clothes off when she was 5, trading clothes with a little girl. Her family assumed, “He’s such a little ladies’ man, he’s already getting the girls to take their clothes off.” As psychiatrist Dr. George Brown says, “GID is listed as a psychiatric disorder. Now, having said that, does that mean people who have it are crazy? Absolutely not.” Brown notes that if transgender people “don’t have dysfunction, and they’re working and they’re getting along in life and they’re happy with who they are and they have good relationships, I would say they don’t have a disorder.”
The film splices interviews with experts on gender identity issues and the five transgender women with footage of children whirling around a playground and other images of happy, normative childhood. While allowing for debate about whether having a different gender identity from one’s biological sex is a “disorder,” it makes the point that in most of American culture there is no room for people who don’t fit into pre-defined gender categories. The consequences are often harsh for those who strongly identify with a gender different from their biological sex.
The consequences start long before the criminal justice system and are behind the disproportionate rate of incarceration for transgender people. The film reveals the shocking statistic that 30 percent of transgender people have been incarcerated. As Dean Spade, an attorney from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, affirms, “More trans people are incarcerated than makes sense. And the question is, Why?”
In the vast majority of the United States, transgender people are not entitled to any form of legal protection from employment or housing discrimination. Linda worked on an oil rig in Wyoming from 1977 to 1983. She says, “I could go on an oil rig and get a job no problem,” and in pictures from her former life she looks every bit the part of an oil rig worker, in baggy jeans with a beer gut. But she says, “I couldn’t stand myself that way.” When she came out as a woman in 1991, she lost her job. “Every time I went to try to get a job for something I knew how to do, I’d have to show ID and they’d say, ‘Oh, Linda Patricia Thompson, but you’re a guy. We can’t have that here.'” Her long blonde hair and earrings swing as she strides through fields of snow, talking about her attempts to get a job for which she was qualified. Eventually she was arrested for stealing aluminum wire to sell for scrap.
For other transgender people, the road to incarceration is tangled up with a host of other factors, principally poverty. Scanning the broken-down row houses of Elizabeth, New Jersey, the camera finally focuses on the slight, feminine face of Yolanda Valentin as she stands behind barbed wire. Born Daniel Valentin, Yolanda says she has been taking female hormones since she was 12 and engaging in prostitution since she was 13. She has never known her father, and her mother is a recovering drug addict. She dropped out of school in the sixth grade and recounts her experience at that time: “I needed food. I needed shelter. I tried to go to school. I tried every other way except for that . . . it just turned out to be a way of life for me.”
Lack of access to affordable treatment options helps explain the disproportionate incarceration rate for transgender individuals, particularly those from impoverished backgrounds. Ophelia De’Lonta looks shyly at the camera as she explains that she was 17 when she robbed a bank. “It wasn’t planned. It was more spontaneous than anything. My idea was to get some money, go to San Francisco, and get [gender reassignment surgery].” She says that she knew that no one would get hurt, “’cause there weren’t no bullets in the gun.” Ophelia was sentenced to 67 years in prison.
Regardless of how they arrived there, prison for transgender women is a nightmare. One reason male and female prisons are segregated by sex is that considerable gender violence occurs in a prison environment. Moreover, transgender women are sent to male prisons even though they identify themselves—and are frequently identified by others—as women. The film articulates these issues by simply listening to the stories of five of these women. According to the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.” The documentary argues that the conditions that transgender women in prison face—sexual assault, solitary confinement, and being refused access to hormone therapy—are inherently cruel, and often they face all three.
All the women featured in the film were sexually abused, assaulted, or harassed by other prisoners and/or by guards. Even in a minimum-security prison, a guard molested Anna Connelly; when she dared to file a complaint, she was told she would never leave the prison alive. Though there are most certainly incidents of violence against women in women’s prisons, it seems starkly obvious from the anecdotal evidence the film offers that transgender women are at a very high risk of violence from men when incarcerated in all-male prisons.
Cruel and Unusual mentions that many prisons place transgender residents in “protective custody” to shield them from violence and rape. However, that protective custody generally means solitary confinement—isolation in a small cell for 23 hours a day—a punishment on top of a punishment for no reason other than a prisoner’s identification with a different gender. Rather than putting transgender women in women’s prisons, the segregation happens within the men’s prison; the prison system is thus admitting that gender violence is expected, but refuses to change the rules of incarceration. Yolanda was placed in solitary confinement for one full year, and she categorizes it as a form of torture akin to being locked in a padded cell in a mental hospital. In the 1989 Davenport vs. DeRoberts case, a U.S. Federal Court ruled that “isolating a human being from other human beings year after year, or even month after month, can cause substantial psychological damage.” Apparently the ruling wasn’t reason enough to stop this practice nationwide. Anna also spent more than a year in solitary confinement, and Ophelia began to self-mutilate by cutting her arms while in isolation.
One of the most traumatic challenges these women face in prison is being refused access to female hormones. Anna Connelly, despite having a prescription, was denied hormones, which resulted in headaches, vomiting, and a serious depression culminating in a suicide attempt. Similarly, Linda consistently petitioned the Idaho Correctional Facility to allow her hormone treatment, and was consistently refused by the warden. According to her matter-of-fact recounting to the filmmakers, she finally removed her own testicles with a razor blade; after her hospital recovery, she was still denied hormone treatment. She then castrated herself in her cell, with no medical antiseptic, anesthetic, or even alcohol or drugs. Subsequent to that hospital recovery, she was still, shockingly, denied hormone treatment. Finally, after winning a lawsuit against the Idaho Correctional Facility, Linda earned counseling and hormone therapy rights for herself, and set a legal precedent for other transgender women in the Idaho prison system.
The documentary’s message of hope resides in victorious court battles like Linda’s. Ophelia faced a similar situation in which the Department of Corrections in Virginia said that transsexuals have no right to estrogen, and she also attempted to castrate herself. She, too, eventually won her case against the Virginia Department of Corrections and was prescribed hormones for “gender identity disorder.” Although Anna was also not able to get hormones while in prison, the film shows her release and her eventual reunion with her son, which is one of the most moving moments in the documentary. Indeed, the five women themselves, because of their humor, resilience, and empathy, more than make up for the predictable interview-format of the documentary. Their small victories remind us of the necessity of changing the structure of the prison system itself so that transgender women are spared victimization and gender violence in their assignment to men’s prisons.
