How can letters and friendship help someone live their trans identity while incarcerated?

Details

This autoethnographic piece was cowritten through letters exchanged between Kitty Rotolo, currently incarcerated in New York State, and Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, an abolitionist organizer and graduate student in New York City. It explores expressions of trans identity, affinity, and community across prison walls.

Reflecting on their friendship, the authors consider the possibilities for mutual recognition afforded by queer kinship—even across the distance and disposability produced by incarceration. Their letters reveal transness as a practice of seeing.

Through letter writing and storytelling, the authors explore how Rotolo has negotiated incarceration in men's prisons, including the transphobic violence of prison, in order to articulate and live transness inside: as individual identity, resistance, affinity, collectivity, and practice.