A transgender woman who was imprisoned in a male jail for theft has said she was raped more than 2,000 times while serving her sentence for auto theft.
Mary (not her real name) spoke to news.com.au where she spoke about the “hell on earth” she found herself in after she was jailed in the 1990s.
“You are basically set upon with conversations about being protected in return for sex," Mary told the reporter.
“It was rape and yes I was flogged and bashed to the point where I knew I had to do it in order to survive, but survival was basically for other prisoners’ pleasure.”
“They are either trying to manipulate you or threaten you into some sort of sexual contact and then, once you perform the requested threat of sex, you are then an easy target as others want their share of sex with you, which is more like rape than consensual sex,” she said.
One the day she arrived to Boggo Road Prison in Brisbane, Australia she was told to strip naked for a body check.
Things got worse from there as gossip travelled and other prisoners found out that she was transgender.
She was not allowed to continue with her hormone treatment so started to grow facial hair again after just a week behind bars, and also lost her long hair when another prisoner cut it off.
“We are human beings and most of us were born this way and we want to just live our lives but are ridiculed by society because we have the guts to be who we are.”
Mary was labelled a high-risk prisoner because she tried to escape three times.
“This meant I would serve all my time in maximum security with the most violent prisoners,” she said.
“I wasn’t escaping for anything else, I just had to get away from the sexual assault.”
After leaving prison she said it was difficult to get her life back in order an experience she said was also endured by another transgender woman who killed herself rather than go back to prison after breaching parole.