The day before George Floyd was murdered, I emailed Dr. Susan Stryker, on a whim, to see if it would be possible to interview her on how the criminal justice system works against transgender people. It was late May, and we were already several months into the pandemic, though certainly not so far along in the nightmare that the extraordinary exception to life as usual had begun to feel like a new, if perverse, norm. Given the social claustrophobia of that time, when the constraints of the pandemic were still too fresh to be taken for granted, I may have simply been looking for excitement. In any case, she rejected my interview request within hours of my sending it. There was not enough time that week.
Great article. Dr. Stryker offers some fantastic insights into the punitive role of the law against transgender people.