California, said officers routinely tormented transgender and non-binary people, mocking their bodies, threatening sexual violence and sometimes physically assaulting them.“We were sick of it.
We weren’t going to let the officers abuse us anymore,” said Rojas, who is gender-nonconforming (GNC) and uses a single name. “We organized on the inside.”In the final year of their sentence at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), the state’s largest women’s prison, Rojas began documenting their experiences, filing grievances and forcing the state to respond.
Since their release in 2017, they have been a leader in an ongoing lawsuit accusing guards of civil rights violations, including attacking trans and GNC people; locking them in.