The rampant banning of texts about queer and transgender people has been in the news a lot recently, but nowhere is book banning more of an issue than in prison. Trans people, in particular, suffer from prisons’ arbitrary restrictions. Sophia Alexsandra Brett Laferriere, a trans woman living in a Washington state prison, told Truthout via the prison’s online messaging system, “Most of the information we ask for doesn’t get to us, or staff steal it or write over it. They block it from us.”

Although data is not easily available, there are clues that indicate the severity of these impacts. For example, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a textbook-like educational resource for trans people, is banned in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin for “obscene material,” and being “sexually explicit,” among other related reasons. In Washington State, prisons keep a copy stocked in the library after legal intervention from the American Civil Liberties Union, but individuals are still not allowed to have a copy, says Dillon.

My latest piece of writing for Truthout is up. Read the rest: https://truthout.org/articles/anti-lgbtq-censorship-is-endangering-trans-people-behind-bars/