We encourage you to read a compelling piece by Ashlee Inscoe, published in Scalawag Magazine, that offers a deeply personal perspective on identity, incarceration, and the realities faced by intersex and transgender people in prison.
In Blurring the Binary: The erasure of intersex people inside the carceral system, Inscoe reflects on the complexity of human identity and the harmful consequences of systems that fail to recognize the full spectrum of human experience. Writing from inside a North Carolina prison, she shares the challenges of navigating incarceration as a transgender woman in an overcrowded men’s facility.
As Inscoe writes:
“Most of us go through life passing by countless people, young and old, people of different nationalities, men, women, and everyone in between. Nature provides us with a beautiful biological spectrum, which is seen in most everything. But society tries to tell us that a person’s sex is strictly one of two things, male and female; however, that is not the case. Sex is also encompassed by natural variations and includes more than just male and female. This is not something new; it’s just not taught to us.
Intersex and transgender people exist. We are humans, people, we are just like anyone else. I am an incarcerated woman in North Carolina where I share an extremely overcrowded prison dorm with 107 men.”
We invite you to read and share Ashlee’s story→
*Art by Ashlee Inscoe