How I Survived Men's Prison as a Woman

Kalani Key, 42, grew up in a mixed Hawaiian-Chinese-Filipino family in Hawaii, where transgender people, or "mahu," were traditionally revered. Born a boy, Key always identified as a woman and starting taking hormones and living openly as female at the age of 15. After experiencing a number of tragedies at a young age -- including the death of her mother, two sisters, and the brutal murder of her boyfriend -- Key turned to the street life. She became addicted to heroin, and worked as a prostitute, drug dealer and thief. Between 1987 and 2005, Key was housed in various men's prisons in California. Today, she is an advocate for transgender women in prison, and works for the TGI Justice Project in San Francisco as a coordinator of the Transforming Justice National Coalition.

I've been to prison 14 times. The first time I went to prison was in 1987 at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. I was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and I got three years.

There were 150 of us transgender girls there. Vacaville was designed for trans women -- we were not mixed with the regular men in the prison. We were all in Category "B," which was for "effeminate homosexual." We were housed together, had access to bras, hormones, and make-up; make-up companies would even come into the prison to test make-up on us, and usually we had female officers dealing with us. I finally felt that this was where I belonged, because I was surrounded by women like me -- and I didn't have that on the outside. I also fell in love with a man named Bruce, who ran with the (Mexican gang) Norteños, and I was actually quite happy.

There were still problems though. There were a lot of blind spots there. A lot of girls were taken into dark corners and raped, but a lot of consensual sex happened too. Most of us had relationships in there; the correctional staff really pushed the girls to have relationships so they weren't running around. And many of the relationships were abusive. There are some men that are very aggressive and very pushy. And if you don't have a way of protecting yourself -- fighting, or having people you can go to -- then you are just left out there alone.

But we were unified, and we would always come together and deal with whatever situation arose. We felt like we ran the prison.

In 1992 I went back to prison on a grand theft conviction. I thought I was going back to the same prison, but I got the shock of my life when I learned they'd gotten rid of the Category "B," and trans girls were dispersed all over the state.

They sent me to Jamestown, which is up in the mountains, near Yosemite. They had never had a girl in the yard. When I got off the bus, the lieutenant took one look at me and said, "Oh no. Get that thing back on the bus."

But in the end they had to take me. They wanted me to go into protective custody because I looked like a female and they didn't want me in the yard. But I knew the system. I refused to sign the paper putting me in "protective custody." That's where they put all the child molesters, and I didn't want to be with them.

So they stuck me in the general population area (no cells -- just one big open space) but they put my cot in front of the officer's desk, and told me I couldn't move more than four feet in any direction.

I met Nacho in there. He was a Norteño, a homeboy of my old boyfriend Bruce, and he took me under his protection. The Asian Pacific Islander "car" (clique) got mad because I stayed with the Norteños in their dorm, but that's that only place I felt safe. I knew I could trust Nacho.

Within two weeks, I had pulled nine people out of the closet. They had been trying to play it straight, but I would walk around the yard and say to them, "I know you want to switch. Join my car!" And it worked.