66, currently imprisoned
Charlie is a Native American who was born biologically female but has identified as a male for as long as he can remember. At five-foot-two, Charlie cuts a slight figure, but his voice is deep, and bounces off the glass windows of the private visiting room where we sit and talk. His long ponytail, once jet-black, bears a growing number of gray hairs. His walking stick hangs on his wheelchair, which sits outside in the common room with the guards (who relentlessly refer to Charlie as “her”). In 1984 Charlie was convicted of the first-degree murder of his girlfriend and sentenced to twenty-seven years to life in prison. He contends that he is innocent of this crime. For his narrative, he prefers not to discuss his conviction in detail. Instead, he describes the societal and institutional pressures to conform to conventional gender identities that he has felt during his life. He speaks about the discrimination he has experienced as a transgender male during the past twenty-five years in the prison system, and his efforts to maintain his dignity and strength throughout. In the last few years, Charlie has started a group in prison to help people with gender-identity issues, a project which helps him stay motivated as he awaits parole.
MY MOM SHOWED HER LOVE BY ALWAYS BEING THERE FOR US
I always knew that my spirit was masculine, that it wasn’t simply homosexuality. My grandmother knew it too, but I think my mom’s whole perspective on it was worry. Considering the world and the human beings in it, it put me in danger. And that’s all she could think of. She said that other people weren’t going to understand, and that she didn’t want to see me hurt. She tried to prepare me for the world the way it was. She said, “You will find that people do not understand you as you are, no matter how good a person you are.”
On October 10, 1945, I was born on a reservation in the Northwest. My two younger sisters and I are real close in age—we were born one, two, three—but it was as if I was a lot older. I was the boss. My mother had polio and she walked with crutches, so when we went places I was kind of the herder to keep my sisters together—hold their hands, make sure they didn’t take off.
When I was a kid, my mom was strict. We were really poor, and she raised us all by herself. She was determined. Some people like to think love means hugging you and kissing you on the cheek all the time. My mom showed her love by always being there for us, by making our clothes, by always being busy doing stuff for us.
My mother was twenty-three when she had me. We left my dad when I was four. He drank a lot, and he was abusive. At first my mom thought that we needed a father, so she was going to put up with him. But when he hit her and knocked her down in front of us, she decided that no, we didn’t need to see all that.
I recall jumping on his back to make him stop. I remember telling him, “You’re not my daddy any more.” One time, he came back and my mom locked herself and us kids in the bedroom. We pushed the dresser drawers up against the door because he was trying to break down the door. We were all pushing and scared to death and he was hollering and yelling that he was going to kill her. So my mom dropped me out of the window and I ran down the road and called the police. As soon as they took my dad, we left.
I FELT THEY WERE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY WHO I AM
I was raised on a reservation, and then I went to a boarding school that was run by Jesuit nuns. It was up on a hill, and was primarily surrounded by wheat fields. It had crab apple trees in the playground and benches built around the trees. We ate a lot of canned crab apples!
The boarding school was really strict. It was almost military-like. We had to make our beds a certain way and have everything all lined up in our drawers. We were required to wear dresses, but other than when I was in school, I only wore jeans, and my shoe choice was always brown Oxfords. I was pretty mischievous and inquisitive, so I used to get in trouble. My friend said a nun told her I was a gifted student they didn’t know what to do with. Back then the only kids who went to schools for gifted students were those whose parents had money. I was pretty much alone, mostly set off by the fact that I was really shy. Other than that, not many kids like a teacher’s pet.
In the seventh grade, my family moved to the nearest city and I went to school there. There was no high school on the reservation, so either you did that or you went to boarding school. I didn’t want to go to eighth grade. I just told the teachers, “I know how to do the work.” And they tested me and they found out that I did, so I skipped the eighth grade and went to public high school when I was eleven, in 1957.
I don’t believe that I felt any kind of prejudice until just before I started high school. When the school district tested me, did I.Q. tests and all that bunch of stuff, they told my mom that she needed to do something. They said she needed to discourage my masculinity, because otherwise I might become homosexual. So my mom tried to discourage me from what I call being myself—dressing the way I dressed. She said that it would only lead to problems for myself. Her assumption was that I would become homosexual, and she was worried about the discrimination that would occur toward me. Before entering high school, I didn’t even know the word homosexual. Growing up, people on the reservation and at boarding school would talk about males being more girl-like, or females being boyish. There wasn’t really a stigma. Mostly, the reservation kids just accepted that I was once a little girl who became a little boy—without any surgery or anything, but just because of the way I was. They kind of took it like, “Okay.”
When I started going to public high school it became more apparent that people treated other people differently. I felt as if the students thought I was different because I was Indian. It was a predominately white school, and the other students there didn’t have anything to do with me, didn’t include me. It wasn’t really any blatant acts, though.
In my first year, I did well academically and I made honor roll. But I didn’t participate in afterschool sports and activities because I had a paper route to do, and I did odd jobs for people. I took care of canaries for this lady, and I used to help this man cut and stack wood. With that money I could go buy a loaf of bread, some milk, rice, whatever, something that we might run out of. At home we were always running out of stuff like that. I would work, and it gave me satisfaction to be able to help out, so I just kept on doing it. Sometimes my mother laments that I always wanted to do those things to help. She says, “Well, you never really had a childhood as a result.” But for me, challenges and learning new things were fun.
In my second year, I joined the band. That was my only extra thing that I did. I played the trumpet and then I played the drums. That was one of my outlets, and one of the few activities that I had with other kids. One thing I liked about the band was the band uniform—you wore pants. Even then, at the public school, girls were required to wear dresses. I hated wearing those dresses. I just felt they were trying to take away who I am. Because of that, toward the end of my second year in high school, I didn’t want to go any more. Then, when I was a junior, I wouldn’t go to school. You could consider that trouble, truancy, whatever. I think that it may have started with missing one or two days. Then I saw how far I’d gotten behind in school, and finally, when I was fifteen, I just said, “Heck with it,” and stopped going.
I DIDN’T LET ANYBODY KNOW I WAS PHYSICALLY FEMALE
On the reservation there weren’t any jobs, because it’s rural, it’s not a city. Some people might work construction, highway-building and stuff, that was near the reservation, because there wasn’t that much construction going on in the reservation. A few people might work at the Indian Agency.1 There was farming, but the farming was done by a white farmer who leased your land to farm it. And some Indians might work for the farmer, but not very many.
In the city next to the reservation, I observed that the good jobs were not done by Indians. I never saw any minorities working at a bank, or in the big clothing stores, like JC Penney’s. So that wasn’t an option for me. You could be a laborer as an Indian, but it seemed you could never aspire to be anything else.
After working for a while in a grocery store, I heard from some people that there were so many minorities in California, and that it would be easier to get a job there. My mom had gotten me a car, and one night, I just decided to go. I was almost nineteen.
When I reached LA, I had run out of money and I was sleeping in my car. I found work as a dishwasher for four days, for three meals a day and $1 an hour. I saved that money, rented a room and then went on daily pay, where you go and work different places, different jobs.
One of my jobs was at a gas station. When I worked there, I found out about prejudice against gays and lesbians. There was a gay bar across the street and some of the male patrons of the bar were dressed kind of feminine. I heard the things my coworkers had to say, some things the other patrons had to say. They called them freaks, weirdos. They said anyone who could act like that was not normal. When I heard those comments, it scared me.
During that period I did not suffer the kind of discrimination that I might have suffered. I was passing as a male, and I didn’t let anybody, except for my partners, know that I was physically female. My circle of associations weren’t gay; I didn’t go to gay bars and stuff like that. I knew I was better off not letting anyone know about my biological sex, because I didn’t know who I could trust. I felt that people would not accept me for myself.
I KNEW MORE EDUCATION WOULD GET ME A BETTER JOB
After several years, I met some Indians in the Los Angeles area, and so I did not feel as homesick. I found other people who talked the same, had gone to Indian boarding schools. Everyone had the same perspective, and it was comforting. One day I saw an advertisement for a Native American scholarship event. I went to the event because I wanted positive associations with other Native Americans.
There, I met another Indian who was an upperclassman at UCLA. We became friends and he encouraged me. This was back in 1972, when I was twenty-seven. Financial aid was available to Native Americans at that time, and he told me, “Now’s the time to go to college. Have you ever thought about it?” He even helped me fill out the application. In the current market, I wasn’t marketable because I didn’t have a college education, and I knew that more education would get me a better job. So I started participating in this college-prep program at UCLA that was meant to bring minorities with academic deficiencies up to college level.
I started singing with a group at UCLA, made up of mostly reservation Indians. I also started going to powwows at least twice a month––they didn’t call them powwows where I’m from, they called them celebrations. A powwow is a gathering of Indians with games, dancing, singing. For the most part, it’s a positive setting. People come together to have fun, to celebrate.
I spent the next ten years studying and working. After going through the college-prep program over five years at UCLA, I went to school for two years in Whittier, working a succession of jobs at the same time. Then I decided to transfer to Cal Poly for a pre-veterinarian program. I’d completed three and a half years of the program, and had been taking care of two of my nephews for several years, before my arrest in 1983, when I was thirty-seven.
During my fourth year of college, I was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. While the charge and the sentence impact my life, I feel that the discrimination I received during arrest, trial, and commitment to prison is the greatest injustice I have experienced.
IT’S LIKE MY GENDER WAS WHAT I WAS REALLY ON TRIAL FOR
I was arrested in Los Angeles County and then brought to San Bernardino County, where I went to trial. They put me in the women’s county jail and my case was sensationalized in the newspapers with headlines like, “Woman who lives as a man murders girlfriend.” When I first arrived, news reporters drove up into the back of the jail and tried taking pictures. I think every time I went to court they tried taking pictures. Every day, for a period of time, there was something in the news.
From leaving high school to my arrest when I was thirty-seven, I was exclusively male. I was able to be me, and to be accepted as me. That period ended a month before my arrest, when the police were investigating my house. One of the officers said, “We’re kind of wondering, if we took you to jail, would you go to a men’s jail or a women’s jail?” I just looked at him. He said, “I’m asking you if you are biologically female or biologically male.” I told him, “Biologically female.”
Throughout the whole eighteen months that I was in county jail during the trial, I was in segregation. At that particular time, guards were isolating females who were masculine, butches, dykes, whatever they called them in those days, in the segregation tanks, away from the rest of the female population.
They had four isolation cells, two on one side of the jail, two on the other side. And the guards would move me all the time between all of those isolation cells. Sometimes in the middle of the night they would come and move me to another isolation cell. I never knew why, but one of the trustees2 later told me that she had overheard the guards talking about how moving me might make my psychological state break down in some way, so that they could have me confess.
Whenever gender-identity was discussed at the trial, I would be on the verge of shock, to the point where it was early September in Southern California—and that’s the hottest time of the year—and I was freezing to death. It was kind of like, Everything’s a nightmare, I want to wake up soon. And every day was like that.
One of the jurors said that he had a problem with my gender-identity, something like that. He said he had a problem with my gender, since some people called me “she”––mostly the district attorney––and some people called me “he.” He was getting confused. Afterward the district attorney said, “If you are really thinking about it, most of us, almost everybody, has a problem with that.” I felt it was obvious that this juror was partial, but the judge allowed him to stay. He just asked the juror, “You could still make a fair, impartial decision, right?”
The district attorney brought up my gender-identity repeatedly. She filed for the judge to admonish the jury that I was to be called “she.” My attorney tried to file a motion to drop any “also known as,” or “aka,” since I had previously legally changed my first name from “Charlene,” to “Charles.” The judge ordered that on the record my name appear as “Charlene” because “Charles” was a masculine name.
In one way or another, the D.A. made sure that my gender was always in the air before the jury, as if that was what was I really on trial for. In the opening statements, the D.A. referred to my appearance and talked about the way I walked, to give the picture that I was aggressive and dangerous. She portrayed me as someone who would fly off the handle and not tolerate anything. The D.A. asked every witness the question, “Did you know Morningstar was born female?” and she referred to me as someone who was “masquerading as a male” to infer dishonesty. The jury were not really paying attention to what the actual evidence was, or whether the actual evidence that they say they had was credible. The judge also seemed to favor the prosecution, because most of the defense’s objections were overruled. My attorney was dumbfounded about how to fight the whole gender identity issue. He was frustrated, he wanted to confront it—he even asked to educate the jury on homosexuality, but the judge denied it. In 1984 I was convicted of first-degree murder and received twenty-seven years to life.
I CAME HERE AND I THOUGHT I HAD RIGHTS
When I initially came to state prison, the guards took me to the captain of the receiving center. There, he notified me that in prison it’s illegal to have sex, whether mutually consented or not. That’s the first thing he said to me. This is before I had been completely processed, because then they give you a shower and debug you and all of that. What was significant about it was that none of the other people that came in on that bus were taken to the captain. I thought, I smell prejudice. The guards had read about my trial and perceived me as a sexual deviant, and considered segregating me from general population. Also, at the receiving center, a group of staff had turned up to see what I looked like, as if I was some kind of animal at the zoo.
Sex wasn’t on my mind. I was still in shock, scared to death, but in fight mode. By fight mode I don’t mean physically striking back, but being aware that an attack was imminent. So I had already pretty much decided that I was going to stick to myself and do whatever was necessary. Because, really, I didn’t think that I was going to be in prison that long. I thought, This is going to get fixed.
Mostly the male guards, and also some of the women guards, acted as if I was going to be a predator against the other women. The guards have a word that they coined: “homosecting,” which means engaging in homosexual activity, as in sexual activity. It isn’t a real word. They also call homosecting acts that might lead to illicit sexual behavior. They won’t look at two very feminine-looking prisoners walking holding hands; they hardly pay attention to them. But if someone who looks more masculine is holding hands with someone who looks feminine, the guards will say something to them like, “Hey stop that homosecting!” Well, that’s gone on since I came to prison. If I hug someone in an affectionate manner to say hello, the guards read into it.
At first, I withdrew within myself. I just didn’t talk to anybody. First of all, there was the “she/her” thing that’s like scratching on a blackboard—when you’ve lived all this time being called by masculine pronouns. Since the staff knew about the newspaper articles about “the woman who lived as a man,” they would talk about putting a dress on me in an attempt to humiliate me.
It hurt—deep-gut pain. Some of the prisoners are looking at you like you’re a freak, and then the other ones are looking at you like you’re sirloin steak, thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to get it on with you.
When I moved to my first housing unit, there was this one attractive young woman. She would say things like, “I’ll show you where the dining hall is,” or, “I’ll find some clothes for you.” She would come over to my cell and talk and stuff like that. I just thought she was being friendly and nice. So one day we were sitting there on the lower bunk and we were talking, and a guard threw the door open and told her to get out of there. Then he slammed the door and locked me in. Well, it wasn’t until much later that I found out that this particular woman had been having an affair with this guard. And then I found out about a year later, after she paroled, that he had written in a log that he’d found us in a sexual position.
When I found that out, I wrote him up—I 602-ed it. A 602 is an inmate grievance form. I took a proactive stand against someone who was discriminating against me. The cost of getting a homosexual write-up for most people is that they lose sixty to ninety days, get extra duty, etc. Losing those days means they are added onto your sentence. If you are not a lifer, you can earn those days back with good behavior, and parole on your original date. But for a lifer the parole board will see the offense for which you were already punished and potentially deny you a parole date, which, under Proposition 9,3 means no more parole hearings for another three to five years. Thus, rather than sixty to ninety days, at a minimum, it will cost a lifer three to five years.
The 602 was not effective at getting the write-up removed from my file, but it didn’t bother me any more. Unlike a lot of the women in prison, I came here and I thought that I had rights. I continued to write-up officers about discrimination. At the time it wasn’t even a law not to discriminate based on sexual orientation. People here are harassed for having short hair and get in trouble for possession of boxer shorts. The guards claim you’re not properly dressed if you don’t have a bra and panties on, and this makes you subject to disciplinary action.
Being able to wear certain clothing, like boxer shorts, is important to me, but I’m denied this in prison. Other transgenders are denied this too. People can get boxers illegally through contraband by special vendors or when family members send them in. But I choose not to go about it illegally. So I started writing, and pretty soon they stopped saying things to me, because they knew I was going to write them up. That helped, and it gave me more fortitude. It heightened my belief in myself and my ability to take care of myself. I thought, Now I know some of the tools to take care of myself in prison.
LOSING SOMEBODY TO A LIFE SENTENCE IS ALMOST LIKE THEM DYING
My mom couldn’t visit me for several years because of her financial situation. The reservation is 995 miles from the prison. If you go by bus, it costs $192 for a one way ticket and takes over thirty hours each way. Later she developed health problems, which made it even harder for her to come. I had been in for five years when she was first able to visit, I believe it was 1988. I had not seen her since early 1983, and I didn’t think I was going to see her again. My friend Barb made all the arrangements for my mom—a place to stay, airline arrangements, made sure she got there, and everything like that.
I met Barb in 1987, through a really complicated series of events. My lawyer’s secretary stole some personal property from my storage unit. Eventually, the secretary got evicted from her house, and Barb, her landlady, ended up in possession of some of the contents of the house. This included a lot of my photographs, my Indian regalia, things that had belonged to my great-great-grandmother, and also some court-related motions and documents. She started reading the court documents, found out I was in prison, and decided to try to find out how she could get this valuable stuff back to me. She got visiting forms for her and her husband, got in contact with me, and asked if she could come to the prison.
At first I was a little bit leery. It took me probably two years to fully embrace her. Growing up on or near a reservation, and being socially among only Indians, it was real hard for me to trust people from other groups as much as I trusted Indians.
With Barb, it was the first time that some white person had done something for me and was so genuinely concerned for me. She told me, “From everything that I’ve read, I don’t believe you did this crime, and I think the conviction occurred because of discrimination and prejudice. I’m one of the people of the state of California who should have been watching, and I wasn’t.”
For me, it was kind of like, Wow, I guess the whole human race isn’t so bad. It was as if Barb and her husband took the weight of the whole state, and they tried to make my life in prison easier. I didn’t have a television, so they bought me a television. My family didn’t have enough money to send me quarterly boxes in which you can get food, clothing, that sort of thing, so Barb started doing that for me too.
Even when Barb couldn’t come to see me, she made sure that her husband or her son came, even if it was just for an hour or so, just to get me something out of the vending machine. Most notable to me about Barb’s family was the fact that they would take time and come on Christmas Day. To this day, Barb and I are real good friends. I saw her the whole period I was at my first prison. But I haven’t seen her since I came to this, new, prison ten years ago. She’s in her seventies now, so she can’t get away to travel up here. I just talk to her on the phone once a week.
My mom’s visit in 1988 was a birthday gift from Barb. She wanted to surprise me, but in prison there’s no such thing as surprise. You have to submit the paperwork and everything, so I knew about it four months ahead of time. My mother came on a Family Living Unit (FLU) visit,4 where you can stay overnight with your family for three days. She looked like she had aged. Losing somebody to a life sentence is almost like them dying. It had aged her a lot.
I enjoyed FLU visits a lot. You’re not under the eye of officers and cameras watching you while you visit. You’re in a relaxed, home-like atmosphere where you can sit back and talk. We talked about family, ancestry, reality. We talked about the possibility that she might not be living when I get out, and how that bothered me.
At that time, people could bring food in from the outside for FLU visits, like pre-packed food to cook. So we would get a small turkey and make a holiday dinner type of thing, and we would sit down and eat and talk. They don’t let visitors bring in outside food any more, I think, because they began considering it a security risk.
The last time I saw my mom was in 1994. I was still at my first prison. Then, in 1996, they stopped lifers from having those kind of FLU visits. It was real hard because my mother was getting older. I didn’t like her going to the regular visiting room because she has lupus, an autoimmune disease, and you can catch cold, flu, all of that really easily.
My mom didn’t have a phone for a long time. Once a week I wrote her letters until about 2001, when I finally talked her into getting a telephone. Her physical condition was getting worse, so I convinced her to get one of those lifeline telephones. Then in 2003 I told her, “I’m going to call once a week.” It’s kind of expensive but it’s important to both of us. Since then I’ve been calling her once a week. I still talk to her. You get fifteen minutes, but it actually works out that you have ten minutes talk time because of the interruptions5 and the bad connection.
I haven’t seen either of my sisters for twenty years. They live on the reservation and they can’t afford to travel. But I talk to them occasionally.
AS LONG AS YOU FEEL INADEQUATE, YOU WILL NOT BECOME ALL YOU CAN BE
I am taking hormones now. I started about a year and a half ago in mid-2009, when I was sixty-four. I get them through the medical department. If you are designated as having gender-identity disorder, then it can be prescribed. Previously, you could only get hormones if you were taking them before you came to prison. Now, if the prison psychologist diagnoses you with gender-identity disorder they are required, as per a recent lawsuit,6 to give you hormones. In 2008 I found out that I could request hormones through an attorney for the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex (TGI) Justice Project,7 who let me know about the ruling.
I was excited to start a process that would align what I look like more with my spiritual self. And now, after doing it for a year and a half, I feel positive about taking hormones. It’s the start of a change that can be legal. I would like to be legally male.
While in prison, I had noticed over the years the discrimination, and that people didn’t have anybody else they could talk to about gender-identity issues. There was no kind of advocacy. So in 2008 I started the Two Spirits Wellness Group. In Native American culture, there aren’t just two genders, and the term “two spirits” is recognition that those people who are gay/lesbian/transgender are actually two spirit people, in their psychological self, their spiritual self. And that maybe the one spirit—male or female—is more dominant than the other, but always recognizing the other. This is a relatively new term in a lot of Indian languages. They used to have a word that meant “boy like girl.” People would say that you were born with female biology, but they usually knew early on in your life that you were more boy-like, or just the opposite for a male child. So in most Native American cultures, they recognize this as another natural form.
When the Two Spirits Wellness Group first started, there were about six people. There are about fifteen people on our docket list now. At the meetings, first of all, we identify. We’ll go around the circle and say “My name is… and I’m transgender, or I’m lesbian, or I’m bi.” Like that. And we’ll say what name we like to go by and what pronoun we’d like to go by to each other. We talk about first recognizing. We do that to reaffirm identity to everyone else, and to encourage other people within our group to say who they are.
Two Spirits is one of the only places in prison where we discuss sex and the risks of having sex. We do have peer helper educators who talk about health concerns, including AIDS/HIV and hepatitis C. But to openly discuss sex the topic, we don’t have that.
Sex is against the law in the prison system. But the fact is that it’s still going to go on. There’s no way to get protection, so if you do it, since hep C is so rampant, there is a risk that you’ll get it. I think most of the Two Spirits group express an appreciation just to talk openly about these issues, how they feel, how they’re treated, with people who understand their perspective.
Most of the people who have started taking hormones in this prison are doing so after I let them know about it in the Two Spirits group. There are some people who did not really know who they were, they hadn’t explored that they were transgender males. They had just considered themselves gay, or masculine lesbians, and because of the stigma they couldn’t admit it to themselves that they really were males.
In Two Spirits meetings, I relate my own experiences to others in the group, and it helps them identify. I started it mostly for people to be able to get a stake in their spiritual identity. We believe that you are what your spirit dictates. In my case, my spirit dictates that I am masculine. We try to help you become strong in your spirit and identity, and to help you be able to function without feeling humiliation, feeling that you are a bad person. As long as you feel inadequate, you will not become all you can be. So you need to be in a better spiritual state.
Some of the members are Native American, but I open it to everybody. In Native American tradition, there’s no separation between your heritage, your religion, your anything. All of it really entails your spiritual self. The whole thing is that all living things created have a spiritual entity. My whole thing is to let people have a space to be themselves.
I go before the parole board again for consideration in July. I’m ready to get out of prison. I feel physically, psychologically, and spiritually strong.
1 The Bureau of Indian Affairs is an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior. It is responsible for providing services to American Indians and Alaska Natives and implementing federal programs within reservations.
2 A prisoner who is allowed to work inside or outside jail.
3 Also known as the Victims’ Bill of Rights Act of 2008, California’s Proposition 9 legislated strict parole reforms. This included restrictions on early release from prison, additional time between parole hearings, and notification of the crime victims of all related criminal proceedings (including parole and sentencing hearings). Proposition 9 has been subsequently challenged by criminal-defense groups.
4 An extended, overnight visit by a family or spouse to a person in prison, which takes place in a designated, semi-private area of the prison designed for this type of visit. For more details, see the glossary.
5 Calls from prison are often interrupted with automated reminders stating how much time is left on the call. For more details on telephone communication from prison, see Appendix VIII.
6 South v. Gomez, 129 F3d 127, 1997 WL 683661 (9th Cir. 1997).
7 A California-based organization that works with transgender, gender variant/gender-queer, and intersex people in California prisons and elsewhere, largely on alternative sentencing, access to hormones, legal assistance, and community organizing.