Sex segregation in prison has long posed a problem for people whose bodies and identities do not fit easily within the gender binary.

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At this year’s EnQueer Sydney Queer Writers Festival, author and community lawyer Sam Elkin joined formerly incarcerated trans woman Stacey Stokes and proud trans woman and manager of Open Doors Youth Service (Qld) Necho Brocchi on stage at Qtopia Sydney for an intimate discussion about trans incarceration. This is an edited extract from their discussion on Saturday 5th October 2024.  

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Sam:

Stacey, you wrote a personal essay called ‘How I Got Here’, for the book Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia. Tell us about that.  

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Stacey:  

Yes, it’s about my experiences of being repressed and messed up and not dealing with my gender issues, and how that in some ways led me into the prison system. I wrote about going to court and the judge in my case didn’t really believe I was trans and just told me I should just cut off all my hair to avoid being bullied. It also goes into the violence and sexual harassment I experienced in prison from both staff and other inmates and my epic battle to receive gender-affirming health care.

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Sam:

Necho, tell us about your essay ‘With Love and Abolition’ in When Cops are Criminals?

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Necho:  

I wrote the essay a couple years ago now alongside three people I support who are in prison and their experiences of transphobia and racism. Those three people are strong, and they really wanted their stories out there. When we speak about trans people in prison, we're forced to discuss the question of whether trans women should go to a men's prison or a women's prison, and where non-binary people are meant to go. But the framing of that question always pits people against each other, and it fails to see that prisons and policing itself are the real problems.

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Sam:

Necho, I was moved by the fact that even though you've had your own difficult experiences with police and the courts, you've moved into a role where you regularly interact with the criminal justice system. How does it feel still working in that space?

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Necho:

I'm not a criminalised person, but I did have to go to court when I was using ice for possession and carrying utensils. So now I realise these were relatively minor charges, but as a 20-year-old who had to wait six months to go to court, I was both scared and scarred by the process. On the first day of going into a women's maximum-security prison in Queensland, I saw someone that I’d grown up with who had been one of my close friends. So yeah, it was hard and was triggering but it was also a great, meaningful job too.

Sam:

Stacey, you’ve been a reader and writer for various prison newspapers and newsletters, tell us about them and what they meant to you when you were inside.

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Stacey:

There’s Inside Out magazine, which is a LGBTIQA+ plus magazine which is in prisons, and Paper Chained which is a creative outlet for incarcerated people. I wrote for ‘The Incarceration Issue’ of Archer Magazine as well.

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It’s so important to have a place for people to write about how they feel, but also so people who aren’t in prison can read it. When you are in prison it can feel like you’ve fallen into a black hole where the truth of the situation can never escape, so it’s important to have the ability to speak out.

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Sam:

Stacey, since you've sort of come out of prison in the last 12 months, you've done some amazing advocacy work. Tell us about that.

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Stacey:

When I was released, I just started writing on Substack because I wanted the truth of my experiences to be there, so it's like, even if I died tomorrow, it’ll still be there. And I got feedback from people who said that they felt better after reading about someone like them, so that meant heaps. I just want to look back on my deathbed and think, I’ve made some kind of positive difference in the world. That my life had a point.