Freedom is Something You Carry Inside
A trans woman’s account of life in a men’s prison in Georgia.
by B Speaks
In a men’s state prison in Georgia, freedom hums to life each morning through the flicker of a fluorescent light for an incarcerated trans woman. It’s not the kind of freedom most people recognize. No open skies, no warm sunrise, but for this woman, it’s a fragile rhythm of survival, dignity, and self-definition.
“The light buzzes like an alarm clock,” she said in an interview conducted in confidentiality. “Every day starts the same way. Beige walls. A ceiling that doesn’t change. And the reminder that I’m not supposed to be here.”
Her name is being withheld for safety reasons, but she’s been serving a sentence in a Georgia men’s correctional facility for several years. Inside, she said, every small act, walking, eating, and writing becomes a negotiation between survival and identity.
“I used to love mornings,” she said. “I’d make coffee in this little chipped mug with purple flowers on it. I’d put on my hormone patch and feel like I was finally becoming myself. That patch felt like freedom. Now, I wake up and it’s gone. There’s no progress here, just waiting.”
Across Georgia’s prison system, incarcerated transgender people describe similar experiences: misgendering, harassment, and denial of medical care, including hormone therapy. Civil rights groups have long criticized state and federal correctional agencies for failing to meet basic healthcare and safety standards for transgender inmates.
The woman described her routine with precision, a ritual of invisibility. “I’ve learned how to move quietly, how to take up as little space as possible,” she said. “You learn to exist without being noticed.”
She shares a cell built for two, where privacy doesn’t exist. Her uniform is issued in men’s sizes and cuts, which she says only deepen her sense of dysphoria. “Every time I put it on, I’m reminded that this place insists on seeing me as something I’m not,” she said.
At breakfast, trays slide through a slot in the wall. The food is bland, but she says the real discomfort comes from being visible. “You feel the stares of people looking at you. Some are truly curious, some hateful, some… other things,” she said quietly. “You keep your head down and you just eat.”
Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) policy allows inmates to request gender-affirming care, but advocates say those requests are often delayed, denied, or ignored. In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that dozens of transgender inmates in Georgia had been refused hormone therapy or placed in unsafe housing.
“When I went to the infirmary to ask about hormones, the nurse didn’t even look up,” the woman recalled. “She said, ‘We don’t cover that.’ Like I was asking for extra dessert. I walked out feeling small.”
That phrase, “we don’t cover that” she said echoed in her mind for days. “It’s like being told your existence isn’t in the budget,” she said.
For her, the loss of hormone treatment isn’t just medical, it’s psychological. “Those injections were how I stayed connected to myself,” she said. “Now I write instead. My notebook is my injection. It keeps me aligned, even when they won’t let me be who I am.”
Each afternoon, when the dorm quiets down, she writes in a small composition notebook she got in her GED class that she hides under the mattress. Its pages are filled with fragments, letters she’ll never send, poems that sound like prayers, reminders that she still exists.
“Writing is the only place I’m free,” she said. “It’s how I remember the sound of my own voice.”
Researchers say that creative expression can be a crucial coping mechanism for incarcerated people, particularly those in marginalized groups. “Writing can serve as both a therapeutic outlet and a form of resistance,” said Dr. Alisha Monroe, a sociologist who studies gender identity and incarceration at Emory University. “For transgender inmates, it’s often one of the only ways to maintain a sense of agency.”
In her notebook, she often returns to one word: freedom. Not the kind promised by the courts or written in laws, but a quieter, internal kind. “Out there, freedom was movement,” she wrote in one entry. “In here, freedom is memory.”
Around midday, she walks laps on the courtyard. “I don’t walk for exercise,” she explained. “I walk because it feels like motion, like I’m still part of time.”
The path loops endlessly, bordered by fencing and guard towers. “My feet move in circles, but in my head I’m walking down Peachtree Street,” she said. “Freedom isn’t where you go, it’s being able to choose when to stop, when to move.”
It’s a philosophy born from confinement, a redefinition of liberty that many incarcerated people come to understand. “Freedom gets smaller here,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it disappears. It just moves inside you.”
By evening, the noise of the dorm grows. Laughter, arguments, the sound of cards slapping against a small table. She eats her snacks quietly, listening. “It’s not the kind of tired sleep fixes,” she said. “It’s the kind that comes from holding yourself together all day.”
She thinks often about the outside world, friends she’s lost touch with, her old apartment, the little routines that once defined her life. “Freedom used to mean deciding what to wear, or choosing if I wanted to be seen,” she said. “Now, freedom is the memory of that choice.”
Advocates argue that her experience reflects a deeper systemic issue: prisons designed around punishment, not personhood.
“Prisons strip people of autonomy by design,” said Erin Swann, a civil rights attorney who has represented transgender inmates in the Southeast. “But for trans women placed in men’s facilities, that stripping goes even deeper, it erases identity.”
According to Swann, the issue is not only medical neglect but moral neglect. “When the state decides whose body is worth care and whose isn’t, it’s deciding who gets to be human,” she said.
Inside her cell, when the lights dim, the woman lies awake under the same flickering bulb that woke her hours earlier. Her cellmate breathes softly. The room is still. “Freedom,” she said, “used to be a door you walked through. Now it’s something you carry inside.” She defines it through small acts: writing her name, remembering her reflection, saying the words that no one else will. “My freedom is in the fact that they can’t make me forget who I am,” she said. “They can control my body, but my self belongs to me.”
Before sleep, she whispers a private affirmation. A ritual she began years ago in front of her bathroom mirror. “You are real,” she says softly to the ceiling. “You are whole. You are free in ways they’ll never understand. The light above hums, alive again in the darkness. Tomorrow it will flicker on once more, and she will rise, silent, steady, still free in her own way.
B Speaks is a writer and advocate interested in prison/criminal justice reform, LGBTQ rights, and government/cultural criticism. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, B served as a political strategist and grassroots organizer in Washington D.C. Currently incarcerated in Georgia, B writes to expose and challenge the realities of the carceral system, advocating for justice reform and the voices often left unheard.