You didn’t think I was done, did you?
Hi.
Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee; The only way to start the second year of the coffee log – with the quintessential cup of joe; that stuff they mass market to middle managers around the USA; that black, thin, pen-ink blend that hits your tongue like a dump truck; the bread and butter of a 9to5 workforce that’s too tired to butter any bread in the mornings; plain, simple coffee, born in factory farms in South America, cut and roasted by underpaid labor, getting in the veins of every wannabe capitalist, giving half-dead men and women enough big daydreams to make it through another day.
Welcome back. Today, like yesterday, and the day before it, I had a cup of coffee. Now I’m here to tell you about it.
But I’ve got a slightly more important cause on my first day back in the Coffee Log saddle.
Josh Shaffer wrote a piece on the 20th for the Durham Herald Sun newspaper. The piece was about a woman named Kanautica Zayre-Brown. Ms. Zayre-Brown did some bad things – insurance fraud, etc – and went to prison. However, the State of North Carolina has decided to detain her for her 9 year sentence in a men’s prison. Why? Because it thinks she’s a man.
Ms. Zayre-Brown made the full surgical and hormonal transition to being bodily a woman a few years ago. Prior to that, from what she and her husband say in the article, she had been mentally a woman for some time. Her name was legally changed to Kanautica Zayre-Brown, but the State of North Carolina still calls her by her birthname. At the prison, she showers in a group with men. Most importantly, Ms. Zayre-Brown says she lives in constant fear of sexual assault. The 8th Amendment to the United States Constitution demands all persons are protected from cruel and unusual punishment. Ms. Zayre-Brown is the only inmate in the Harnett County Correctional Facility to be singled out like this. That is unusual. She’s terrified in a way no-one else in that facility can be. That is cruel.
If you live in a country that gives you voting rights, make sure you hold your politicians accountable for their views on criminal justice reform. If you live in America, make sure you funnel some of the energy in 2020’s elections to your local tickets as well as the Presidential. And if you’re brave and able or in a position with a platform, march against injustice, protest how you can, call your representatives, or at the very least tell your family and friends when something awful is going on.
If you don’t fight for everyone then you fight for no-one. No matter what you might think of Ms. Zayre-Brown if you met her, she deserves basic human dignity. She deserves better than this.
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Zayre-Brown said that if she had such housing, she could work and begin paying restitution, serving her sentence constructively rather than in fear.
Josh Shaffer and Kanautica Zayre-Brown, “Transgender woman inmate…“, The Herald Sun Newspaper
“I would feel the way I’m supposed to feel when I wake up every day: a beautiful girl,” she said. “Being here will make you an angry transgender woman.”
Livesay Writing 