When I was a kid, I always felt different. I never felt like I belonged. I didn’t feel like I completely connected with other boys, yet I learned how to fit in and be a boy. I continued this well into adulthood, always watching the mannerisms of men, to mimic them. I had mastered what it is to be a man. However, I only did this out of fear. Fear of society. Fear in knowing I wouldn’t be accepted.
When I was nearly 12 years old, I knew for certain I was different. Alone, I went through a major crisis. Leading up to this time in my life, inside myself, I felt drawn towards these unique feminine feelings. The crisis: For months I anticipated the growth of my breast. I had always been referred to as a boy. I didn’t understand biology then and so I truly thought (because how I felt on the inside) I would begin to develop like other girls and this would force me into being discovered. After living several months in this fear and realizing I wouldn’t develop a chest, I told myself no matter what, I had to keep this hidden. To do so, I condemned myself to a life sentence inside my own body.
In 2015 I was sentenced by the state of Texas to a life term in prison. I felt a deeper kind of depression envelope my life. In 2020 Covid hit the unit I was housed and the long quarantines began. I remember the first lockdown was nearly half a year. The only moments of relief were going outside the cell, rare days when I got a hot tray, and showers 3 days a week. Since an officer who from before the lockdown knew me as a good worker, I was picked for several work details. These times truly made a person feel like a human again and not lost and forgotten. The quarantines continued at random intervals the next few years.
In 2021, I hadn’t heard from my mother in several weeks. This was very unusual for she had always written once a week. I began to experience a new kind of anxiety. I had become favored enough in my job that the Sargent came to my cell when he heard that I was extremely stressed about my mother. He took me to the office and allowed me to make an emergency phone call to my brother. This is very rare for any officer to do for an inmate. My mother had Covid. This destroyed me. Within the next month or so, she passed away. There was nobody in this world like her, I had already been missing her. Now I’ll never see her again. I wasn’t even informed of her passing until a month after the funeral. There were nights I didn’t sleep. The very walls of both of the prisons I was trapped in began to shrink over the next year. I was being suffocated in my own body.
Mid-Summer of 2022, I received a very late birthday card from my father whom I hadn’t heard from in 8 years. He hadn’t spoken to my mother in nearly a quarter-century. His card was the only thing I received from any family since my mother’s passing. My father brought up the topic of my mother’s death, and this caused many tears. However, in some odd way, I needed those tears. I needed that breakdown of my emotions. This was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” During the next several days, I experienced high levels of anxiety and depression. I struggled to separate my nights and days. I refused work for the first time. I reached out to the mental health department and medical staff. I was feeling elevated anxiety, a surge in my heart rate, at some points a muscle-like twitch near my heart, and lightheadedness and sometimes dizziness. I needed to talk to somebody, anybody. Days went by with no reply to my requests. Walking to lunch one day, I saw the Lieutenant for the job I worked. I had known him for 8 years.
I told him what I was going through and before I could finish the second sentence, I was in tears. He immediately halted all hallway traffic and picked up the desk phone to call mental health to ask them to speak with me. I went immediately.
The only thoughts on my mind walking in were to figure out why I had been experiencing such dramatic levels of emotions to the degree that it had caused physical abnormalities. After reiterating the process of grief in the first session, I still felt a massive pull at my heart. Something was trying to tell me something.
Throughout my life, I have always found moments to be me while nobody else was around. These are the moments that got me through a lot in life and were quite therapeutic. During these times I’d dress in a fashion to match my mind, my soul. I would even put on make-up or fix what little hair I had. In prison, to keep my secret hidden, I did this behind a sheet in the cell for maybe an hour or so. Only to remove it all and return to being a stereotypical male.
One night, after my first mental health visit, that something pulling at my heart revealed itself. It was me all along. I was begging myself to let me out. I wanted to be free. I went to mental health the next day and I was terrified. I rehearsed it in my mind a thousand times. During the visit, I still couldn’t come out with it. I kept saying that “there’s something inside me that I want to get out.” When the counselor was ending our visit, she asked “out of all the things for us to work on, what is the one you want to start on”? I took in a deep breath, eyes beginning to fill with tears. I stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Then finally, after nearly 3 decades, I said “I am a female on the inside and nobody knows.” That sentence changed my life forever. Her reply was that this could be what has caused anxiety my entire life.
That very day when I returned to my cell, I no longer put the sheet up to cover what I wore and how I wanted wear it. I immediately became very consciously aware of my chest and began to openly wear a handmade bra. I put on make-up and was teased by long-time friends to the point of humiliation. But each person took it more seriously than I ever expected. I received so much acceptance and support that I couldn’t fit it all in this story. I live each and every moment of every day as the woman I was born. I live in a men’s prison and I’ve been here long enough to know to keep a keen eye on every situation around me. Everything isn’t all blissful all the time and I have experienced uncomfortable situations, so keeping myself safe is a daily effort. I am currently an oddity and a novelty in my surroundings. I do not walk these halls being naive. I will never let this world convince me again not to be myself. Deep within, I know my escape from myself is what I was experiencing during the first year after my mother’s passing. I trust the path ahead for I know she’ll always be around. Because of mom, for the first time in my existence, I am free and my name is Stacey!
Stacey Karr
