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Kristin Lyseggen was absolutely disgusted. She had just finished reading about Grace, a transgender woman from Liberia who had spent time in a solitary confinement in a male immigration detention center in California. According to Grace (whose last name is not included due to an ongoing dispute between the two of them), during her sentence she was sexually harassed, constantly called derogatory names, suffered a mental breakdown and attempted suicide.
"When I read about Grace, I just could not believe what I was reading," Lyseggen told Windy City Times.
With her curiosity at its peak in 2012, she managed to get in touch with Janetta Louise Johnson, a transgender woman who had served three and a half years from 2009-2012 in a male prison at the Sheridan Correctional Center in Oregon and will become the new executive director at the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP)-an organization that supports transgender people in prison-in October.
Hearing Johnson's story first-hand was just as jarring for Lyseggen.
"I just thought I'm going to have to write a book about this," said the Norwegian-born photojournalist who previously authored The Boy Who Was Not A Lesbian and Other True Stories. "This is not normal! You don't throw women into the Colosseum with...