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‘I Feel Like I’m Disappearing’: Transgender Migrants Are Languishing in Detention Centers
Transgender detainees have to contend with a hostile environment and a startling lack of medical care — in addition to all the other difficulties of life spent in a cage
As a child in Honduras, Kristal was often punished for wanting to play with girls’ toys. Assigned male at birth, and treated like a boy by her family, Kristal always felt she had to hide who she was. Almost the entirety of Kristal’s young life was one of ridicule, harassment, and fear. Her parents would scold her for displaying any feminine tendencies.
When Kristal (whose last name was not used in the piece for her own safety) was 18, she came out to her family as transgender. To her parents, it was an unconscionable admission; they responded by throwing her out of the house. Settling in with an aunt, she finally started dressing as a woman. And yet still she was not safe: At 23, she was kidnapped, assaulted, and forced into prostitution.
After a year of fear, abuse, and forced sex work, she decided to flee Honduras. In May 2018, she, together with a group of 16 other trans women she’d met on her journey, arrived at the border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego…
