the ability to navigate that process,” said Mattson. “They’re burned out; they’re illiterate; they’ve already given up.” In her final months in prison, Mattson accumulated a vast archive of the pink and yellow grievance forms, which she shared with Seven Days. One halfinch-thick stack deals exclusively with her attempts to get women’s clothes, which were unavailable to her through the prison commissary. When her wife tried to mail her packages, the facility denied them on the basis that Mattson had been issued men’s clothing upon arriving at the facility and was not entitled to personal property beyond her allotment, which meant, effectively, that she couldn’t obtain belongings that matched her gender identity. “Directive 432.01 allows for accommodations regarding gender identity in accordance with the property matrix,” supervisor Stephen Russell wrote in response to a grievance Mattson filed contesting the denial. “Directive 432.01 does not make any reference to allowing a special package.”
It felt worse to hide all the time. JA S M INE KL EI N
Corrections officers misgendered her constantly, said Mattson; when she managed to shower alone, one particular male guard would walk into the bathroom without announcing himself, a violation of Directive 432.01’s requirement that staff of the opposite gender knock before entering a cell or restroom. Mattson filed a grievance against the officer, to which a supervisor responded in writing: “COs do not have to announce themselves.” At best, Mattson said, the staff dismissed her as a nuisance; at worst, they treated her like a con artist. On one occasion, she said, a male facilitator in one of her mandatory counseling programs even told her that she “just had some kind of sexual kink” and that she wasn’t actually trans. “People clearly had never dealt with someone like me before,” Mattson said. “A lot of them thought I was faking it to cause them problems, or to get special accommodations, or to build a lawsuit or something. Like, are you serious? Do you really think I’m gonna pretend to be one of the most hated and oppressed minorities in the world to gain some bullshit privilege from you?”
‘PUNISHED FOR BEING TRANS’
By mid-March, Jasmine Klein, back in Chittenden Regional, was starting to unravel. She and the cellmate who had coerced her into sex had been separated for reasons unrelated to the incident, and Klein was moved into a cell with a woman who berated her for being trans and told her she belonged in a men’s facility. Finally, Klein snapped. She told one of her friends, another transgender woman held at Chittenden Regional, about what had happened with her cellmate, and her friend reported it to a corrections officer. Klein said that both she and her cellmate were questioned about the incident; Klein, fearing retaliation if she spoke out, lied and said the sex was consensual. On March 22, she was placed in administrative segregation, the highest level of isolation and supervision in a prison, as punishment. A few days later, Klein worked up the courage to tell an officer the truth about what happened. “She acted kind of annoyed when I told her,” Klein said. “She was about to end her shift, and she was like, ‘Well, I guess I have to go tell my supervisor.’” Klein also reported the assault to the Vermont State Police, who told her they weren’t sure what they could do for her. Under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, someone who reports a sexual assault must be separated from the alleged perpetrator, which means being relocated to another unit. For more than three weeks after Klein reported the assault, the woman who coerced Klein into sex remained in the same unit, under less restrictive supervision. Almost every day, Klein said, the woman would walk past her cell and attempt to provoke her, flipping her off and mouthing obscenities. The facility took no action to separate them until April 15, after Seven Days asked Cormier, the operations chief, about the situation. That night, according to Klein, the woman was moved into another part of the facility, and a supervisor informed Klein that staff would be on alert for signs that her former cellmate or other corrections officers were harassing her for reporting the assault. Klein took little comfort in that intervention. For more than a month, she has spent 22 out of 24 hours a day in a camerasurveilled cell, nine paces wide, with no partition separating the toilet from the rest of the room. “I still feel like I’m getting punished for being trans,” said Klein. “I’m sick of being dehumanized and treated like a predator. I just want to be treated like a female, like a regular person.” m
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