When looking at Floridian news, there are always these ridiculous and often hilarious headlines like “Florida Man Charged with Assault with a Deadly Weapon After Throwing Alligator Through Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window,” or “Florida Man Trapped in Unlocked Closet for Two Days,” which, honestly, aside from all the other fucked up things already going on in Florida, really makes you wonder what the hell do they have in their water? So, in a way, it was only a matter of time before a headline involved Florida Cops. This one, however, is not at all hilarious, if ridiculously harmful in its backwards thinking and violating actions.
Nikita Dragun, a fairly controversial influencer, is a transgender woman. She started sharing her trans journey on her platforms around 2018 when she started taking her hormone therapy, but has been publicly using she/her pronouns since 2015. Around a week ago, she got arrested and got placed in a men’s jail, directly violating Florida protocol, which “mandates that transgender inmates are classified and housed on safety needs and gender identity” (Rolling Stone). According to Impact, a news account on Instagram, the Miami-Dade Police Department said that “Dragun appears as a female but would like to be recognized as a male,” aside from the fact that she is legally a female. They also used he/him pronouns for her in the affidavit and listed her as male in her correction center inmate profile (Impact).
And the thing is, what happened to Nikita is absolutely horrible, a complete violation of her human rights, but it’s not anything new. It just blew up now because she’s famous, with an important online presence. But trans people have been dealing with this purposeful misgendering in jails and prisons for years, with little to no reparations or any real effort to avoid it from happening again. At the same exact jail that Dragun was placed in, the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami-Dade County, three other trans individuals had been abused, filing a lawsuit against Miami-Dade County (NPR). “The plaintiffs were reportedly strip-searched, misgendered, placed in solitary confinement, and more” (Them.us) on the sole basis that they were transgender. This shows that not only is Nikita not the first nor the only trans person to go through this violation by the police, but also lends to the assumption that many others have gone through the same ordeal and just have not come forward with their experiences.
At this point, I don’t even know why it’s still surprising to see news like this. Maybe it’s because we always use the phrase “We’re in the 21st century for Christ’s sake!” thinking that that phrase is gonna bring more progress than where we currently are, still in the 21st century. Sure, we’ve progressed a lot from practically permanent closets and the degree of bigotry that used to be ever-present and pervasive, at least the bigotry is what needs to be more closeted now. Oh, how the tables turn! But still, with every new piece of news that happens it’s like we take one-step forward and two-steps backwards, and say, “Yay! Progress,” and call it a day. The thing is that as much as Nikita’s case is the one that made the headlines, trans people suffer daily, in and out of jail/prison. In prison, however, it was found in a 2020 investigation, that “almost all trans inmates in the U.S. are housed by their sex at birth instead of their gender identity” and that trans people “are often denied routine healthcare and hormone therapy while in jail” (Impact). And they are more likely to experience rape and sexual assault while incarcerated to the point that in 2015 it was found that trans people are “5 to 6x more likely to be sexually assaulted by facility staff and 9 to 10x more likely to be assaulted by other inmates” (Impact), revealing the truth that jail is a much more dangerous place for trans individuals than for non-queer people. It’s like as soon as you identify as a member of the queer community, in the eyes of most others, a part of your humanity is stripped in your queerness, creating the spaces for these human rights violations, without fear of repercussions. These police officers who arrested Dragun, outright lied in their processing of her arrest by saying that she identified as male, and misgendering her with he/him pronouns in the affidavit of her arrest, regardless of the fact that she is a public figure that is both legally female and has been openly identifying as female online for nearly a decade now. The feeling of invincibility that these police officers had, which reflects upon the institution itself, when making the arrest just further reveals the systematic oppression and aggressively stomps on the word “progress” that we’ve become so fond of.