“People must think if you go to a female prison, you’re going to rape women and you’re not - it doesn’t make any sense,” Mary said. Mary says she just can’t understand why it happens. Transgender advocate CeCe McDonald, who was jailed for defending herself against a group that hurled transphobic and racial slurs at her in 2011, also served her sentence in a male prison. Tara Hudson was sent to a female prison after a petition was circulated. “She was eventually released but was arrested for breaching parole and she hung herself so she didn’t have to go back to prison,” Mary said. Unlike Mary, this transgender woman was not able to live with what happened to her. She was also a transgender woman and too was targeted for sex. There was one other person in the prison however, who did understand Mary. Mary tried to fight for her hormones but said it was a strict no. “Your hormonal levels drop so fast, you just start going haywire within a week.” She was also denied her hormones, and began to grow facial hair again.
“It was like my identity was taken away from me.” “It was halfway down my back, it was horrific,” Mary said. When she arrived in jail, a prisoner cut her long locks into a crew cut. “Each time I said no and tried to push them away, they just force you and it’s not just one or two people, there’s a bunch of them,” she said.īut it wasn’t just the rape that has caused Mary’s distress. In her first couple of nights in jail, Mary tried to defend herself and pushed prisoners off her, but she was flogged. “I wasn’t escaping for anything else, I just had to get away from the sexual assault.”
“This meant I would serve all my time in maximum security with the most violent prisoners,” she said. “It was hell on earth, it was as if I died and this was my punishment.”ĭuring her sentence, Mary was labelled a high-risk prisoner because she tried to escape three times. “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,” she said. Mary said she was forced into performing sexual acts more than 2000 times when she was serving her sentence, which was about four years long. She transferred to other prisons across the state and while she was assaulted at all of them, she said Boggo Road was the worst and most violent. “It makes you feel sick but you have no way of defending yourself,” she said. Mary not once wanted to have sex with prisoners, she said she only did it because she was so scared of being bashed.Īt times, Mary was put into a cell for prisoners who needed protection, but even then she said she was assaulted by sex offenders.