After explaining 'What is transgender?' this first book on transgender in a prison setting looks at the entire HM Prison Service regime for such people. Ranging from hard information about rules and regulations, the transition process and how to access it to practical suggestions about clothing, wigs and hairpieces, make-up and coming out, the book also deals with such matters as change of name, gender identity clinics, hormones, medication and use of prison showers and toilets. Covering the entire transition process the book contains contributions from a number of transgender prisoners as well as extracts from reports showing how those in transition still tend to attract a negative portrayal. Also included are the special security implications of related procedures and descriptions of the attitudes to transgender inmates of other prisoners and staff. It contains a number of appendices dealing with the latest 2016 HM Prison Service Instruction on transgender prisoners and a range of support mechanisms including a list of specialists in the field and other useful reference sources and contacts.
It also contains Sarah Jane Baker's account of her own male-to-female transition and the difficulties she has faced behind bars. The first book of its kind, written by a transgender life-sentence prisoner. Includes key extracts from official publications. With a graphic account of the author's own transition journey. Contains practical information and tips.
Baker, Sarah Jane: - Sarah Jane Baker is a talented musician, poet and author who has served 25 years of a life sentence for the attempted murder of another prisoner. The winner of countless awards and a qualified counsellor, she is (as Alan Baker before her transition) the author of Life Imprisonment: An Unofficial Guide (Waterside Press, 2013).
Stockwell, Pam: - Pam Stockwell is a mother of three, grandmother of four and formerly a teacher of French. Early in the 1990s she ran into a former pupil (a 'lovable rogue') in trouble who needed a character reference for court. She provided one, attended with him and offered moral support. He was spared a custodial sentence and subsequently stayed out of trouble. Later it occurred to her that there must be many youngsters in a similar situation, who had not had the advantages her own children had enjoyed, and became a Voluntary Associate with an organization whose members, in those days, worked alongside probation officers. This led to her writing to and sometimes visiting 'clients' in various prisons. One of these was HM Prison Full Sutton, a maximum security prison near York, where Alan Baker was serving a discretionary life sentence, but who received no visits or letters. After first writing she visited him. Originally hostile, by the end of the visit, he had decided that she had not, as he suspected, been sent to 'spy' on him, and agreed that she should visit him again. So began a roller-coaster friendship that has lasted over 25 years. Pam considers that Alan-now Sarah-has made her see life from a different perspective and enriched it with a special kind of love, pride, joy, anguish, hope and despair.
