A Wild Elegance, Issue One , Post three
included here: Even In America,
poetry Corner,
transsexualism and Incarceration

EVEN IN AMERICA
By Michelle Lynne Kosilek

Imagine if you will, that you have a potentially fatal illness and you get put in prison, where the U.S. Supreme Court says you have an absolute right to state paid medical treatment, because the state has, by virtue of your imprisonment, deprived you of a living wage that would allow you to provide for your own medical care.

For seventeen years, you slowly die a little bit every day while you try to convince your jailers that you have this condition and even provide them with a clinical diagnosis from a qualified medical professional. They ignore this diagnosis and continue to refuse to have you seen by any clinician who specializes in the treatment of this condition.

In frustration you file a federal civil rights lawsuit and your jailers respond by telling the judge that you are crazy, that you have a diagnosis called Borderline Personality Disorder, a mental illness that closely mimics psychosis. The court believes this and dismisses your complaint because you have no expert testimony to support your claims.

You try to get back into court, but you don't have the resources to attack the state's deceptive litigation practices, and you have no money for an attorney, so you ask the prison trained legal aides for help and they refuse by order of the warden at your facility, who tells you that this is not a valid challenge to the conditions of your confinement! You appeal this decision, and your appeal is denied on the basis that your complaint is not a valid challenge to your conditions of confinement and that they ( the prison system ) do not have to provide medical treatment for every medical condition.

By sheer chance, you are contacted by another prisoner in another state who has successfully sued for the treatment for the same condition. She offers to help you and sends you legal documents. The mail room supervisor confiscates and destroys them, claiming that the prison mail room policy KSP 16.2, disallows this, when it clearly DOES allow it! At this point things become very scary as those charged with protecting you are slowly killing you. The condition you suffer from is very rare, so people are reluctant to accept it as real, and there is a fair amount of bigotry attendant to such beliefs.

Now imagine that your insistence on receiving treatment has caused you to be placed in isolation, where your already fragile mental state deteriorates further. You've been denied treatment, legal help, and have been locked in isolation because you have an internationally recognized medical condition that caused you to be born with the brain of a woman. Recent research has demonstrated that male to female transsexuals have a female brain structure and that they are born like this. A genetic anomaly that has caused you to be born with the brain of a woman, and the genitals of a man. To add insult to injury, you are punished for trying to adopt a feminine appearance and as part of your punishment, your head is forcibly shaved!

In total desperation, you try to remove the source of male hormones that have masculinized your female self. Your jailers take you to a hospital, have you repaired, and give you isolation time as further punishment for trying to perform surgery on yourself that has otherwise been denied to you for 17 years. You have no hope left, and your next move,according to experts in GID, is suicide.

This is the life of my sister Shelly Leann Wright 102077, who has five more years to look forward to at the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville, KY., PO Box 5128, 42038.
The Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union could not be bothered to help shelly, nor even respond to our inquires for help, or return documents sent to them. Is there anyone out there that can help me save Shelly's life?


POETRY CORNER
We will be publishing a limited amount of poetry in each newsletter and look forward to receiving submissions for this. Quality will be the deciding factor.
All material submitted must be original, and certified as such on each page of your poetry. By certified, we mean that you must write on each page or your poetry that you are certifying that the material is your own original work.
You should try to make your poetry about your gender identity disorder and how it has affected you personally & how it interfaces with your prison environment.


TRANSSEXUALISM AND INCARCERATION
People who walk between the traditional boundaries of sex and gender face significant challenges while incarcerated. These individuals - transsexuals - are those for whom biological sex and gender identification are not always congruent.

Prison systems in this country generally have a small number of transsexual prisoners, but it is disproportionately high when compared to the general population. For example, the Wisconsin DOC has 8 known transsexuals incarcerated, with 5 more labeled as having gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria which lasts more than two years is classified as transsexualism, or by the newer term, gender identity disorder. That is extremely high considering that Wisconsin DOC has less than 30,000 prisoners, and transsexualism occurs at a rate of about 1 in 30,000 biological males.

TS prisoners are frequently at very high risk of sexual assault in certain prison systems in this country, where they are often set up to be sexually assaulted. Sometimes those assaults are committed by the very people who should be preventing them.

TS prisoners who are treated as males in their prison system are at particularly high risk of self injurious behaviors, such as suicide attempts and genital mutilations and castration attempts. This self harm is generally linked to extremely abusive treatment of the inmate secondary to that inmates transsexualism. ie: being forcibly treated as a male. In many cases this means that staff purposely and with exaggerated emphasis, address TS inmates as males, with a male name.

It means conducting offensive strip searches on TS inmates in which 6 or 8 male guards are present to watch, for no legitimate reason.
MTF's experience strip searches conducted by male guards as sexual assaults, just like most females would. And while TS inmates have all complained about this in their various prison systems, their pleas not to be victimized in this way are ignored. And male prison officials and guards fight

very hard to ensure that they can continue to do this to us.
Forcibly treating TS prisoners as males worsens any other existing clinical pathology in these individuals and Can result in additional mental illnesses developing.
It means refusing to allow TS inmates to feminize their appearance in any way, and denying TS inmates hormone therapy if they did not enter the prison system on such therapy. In some prison systems, TS prisoners are not even allowed hormone therapy if they enter the prison system on such therapy.

They are forced to go through withdrawal of their female hormones and face potentially life threatening medical conditions as a result of having their hormone therapy discontinued, especially if they have been on such therapy for a significant amount of time. Discontinuation of hormone therapy puts TS prisoners at high risk for self-mutilating behaviors and suicide.
At the very least, MTF TS prisoners with gender identity disorder need some female hormone therapy, strip searches to be performed by female staff in such cases where the individual has already been fully developed into a female physically through hormone therapy, be allowed a one time name change to a female name, be addressed as a female and with female pronouns, be showered separate from male inmates without being sexualized or put on display, and some female clothing and makeup to help consolidate a female identity.

The above would cost very little for state prison systems, but very few of them provide any of this to TS prisoners. Which results in TS prisoners suing prison systems and creating costly litigation that costs taxpayers many thousands of times more than the originally requested treatment would have cost. But thats what happens when prisons are allowed to be run in secrecy without any public oversight and a belief that they can treat prisoners however they please with no repercussions.

If you are a TS prisoner and are or have been trying to obtain treatment for your gender identity disorder, which is a recognized medical condition, and are not receiving it, make copies of your requests, symptoms, how you are feeling as a result of a failure to provide that treatment to you, file a grievance and exhaust all of your administrative remedies exactly as the prisoner litigation reform act and your prison grievance procedures require, and pursue legal action.

Courts are now more open than ever to lawsuits filed by TS prisoners who are not receiving treatment for their medical condition. Attorneys are being appointed to represent TS prisoners in such litigation, but you must go through the initial steps on your own. When you do get an attorney, make CERTAIN that attorney networks with other attorneys who have been or are currently involved in similar litigation. This has been a very important strategy in our winning these types of lawsuits, and it is working. We are winning by networking with one another.
When you seek help from your sisters who have already won ahead of you, make sure you do what they ask you and provide the information that they ask you to provide. We are only going to win if we work together and help each other.

If you are a TS prisoner who is not receiving treatment or know of someone who is not, and you want help filing a lawsuit to get that treatment, you can contact the following individuals for some basic help on how to go through the initial steps that lead up to filing a lawsuit, beginning with requesting the actual medical care for your gender identity disorder, at the institution level.
DONNA DAWN KONITZER
PO BOX 220
WINNEBAGO Wl 54985-0220

MICHELLE LYNNE KOSILEK
PO BOX 43
NORFOLK MA 02056

MARK "JESSICA" BROOKS
#90A6426
PO BOX 618
AUBURN NY 13024

Never address any TS prisoner mail with a female name if there is a male name as part of the address on the envelope unless that TS prisoner tells you it is okay to do so. Some prison systems or individual prisons will refuse mail if it is addressed with a female name.
If you are in a state which does not allow correspondence between prisoners, make sure that you make that known to others so that they do not waste their time and money sending you legal information, perhaps photocopies in the mail directly only to have it returned to them. Be responsible in your requests for help and provide all the necessary information requested.

A Wild Elegance will be printing limited pen pal ads. This is a support publication for those who have made the choice to stop hiding their condition from themselves and others.
Your ad will not be printed unless your address includes your institution number and the name of your prison. No exceptions. Your ad will be a basic listing of your address with a brief ten word sentence underneath it. No smut no soliciting. All ads are subject to my arbitrary approval, and must include your complete name and address and prison number. Ads without a prisoner ID number and name of prison will be discarded.

All ads must include whether or not you can be addressed in your female name on the envelope, or not. This publication is not for curious male prisoners who do not have GID. In the body of the letter itself, you will be addressed by your female name. If you chose not to provide your female name you will be assumed not to have one and will not be listed or placed on our mailing list. Some prisons allow TS inmates to have their ( true ) female name as part of their address on the envelope and others do not. Make very certain that you specify in your correspondence to us which is true for your particular situation, or whether you have had a legal name change and are therefore not required to use a male name at all.Don't waste other people's time. If you are not serious and genuinely interested in getting medical care for your GID, don't request help in that area, just out of curiosity, to see how much work might be involved.

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