s hotel in Brentwood, Missouri. Photograph: Paul Sableman/ flickr
Lauren Gambino in New York
Tuesday 10 November 2015 16.52 EST
Last modified on Tuesday 10 November 2015 17.03 EST
A transgender woman was jailed for eight days after staff at the
hotel where she was staying with a friend called the police to report
two “men dressed like women” were engaging in prostitution, according to
a complaint filed by the ACLU on Tuesday.
Last July, Meagan Taylor and her friend, both black transgender women, spent the night at the Drury Inn in West Des Moines,
Iowa ,
on their way to Kansas City for a funeral. But Taylor ended up spending
the next eight days in a county jail for possessing her hormone drugs
without a copy of her prescription, according to the ACLU’s complaint.
After the women checked into their room, staff called police to
report that they suspected the two hotel guests, described as “men
dressed like women”, were engaging in prostitution, according to the
lawsuit. The next morning, the women were woken up by loud bangs on the
door.
The lawsuit alleges that the Drury Inn discriminated against Taylor
based on her gender identity and race, a violation of state law which
defines gender identity as “a gender-related identity of a person,
regardless of the person’s assigned sex at birth”.
For Meagan, a stop at a hotel on the way to a funeral landed her in
solitary confinement because she is black and transgender,” said Chase
Strangio, attorney in the ACLU’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender
Project, in a statement. “This type of profiling of transgender women
of color is all too common and is part of the cycle that results in 41%
of black transgender women having been incarcerated at some point in
their lives.”
In the
complaint , Taylor describes her ordeal as “humiliating, scary and traumatizing”.
She said that the hotel staff were suspicious of her and her friend
from the moment they arrived, casting “disgusted” glances their way and
whispering about them as if they weren’t there. At one point, the front
desk clerk asked to make a copy of Taylor’s ID card even though the
hotel had already processed her payment, she says in the complaint. The
ID reflected Taylor’s birth name and gender because she said that she
could not afford to legally change her name and update her documents.
West
Des Moines police said that they were notified of “two males dressed as
females who checked into the Drury Inn”, and that the hotel staff
expressed concern about “possible prostitution activity”.
When the police searched their hotel room the following morning, the
found no evidence of prostitution. However, Taylor was arrested and
charged with possessing her hormone pills without a copy of the
prescription, as well as two other charges.
She spent eight days in Polk County jail, several of them in solitary
confinement, before activists raised enough money to post bond.
All charges were later dropped.
“As a black trans woman, I am used to unfair and discriminatory
treatment, but this was extra upsetting because we were paying customers
at a hotel and on our way to a funeral,” Taylor, 23,
wrote in a post published on the ACLU’s website. “I felt like I had no rights.”
The jail Taylor was held at did not have a policy for transgender people, Taylor described in the post.
When they did the pat down, they had a woman pat down my top half,
but a man pat down my bottom half, as if I’m not one person but two,”
she wrote of her experience.
She said, however, that the jail had made attempts to accommodate her
while she was there and had contacted an LGBT organization for
assistance. They have since begun the process of creating a policy for
housing transgender inmates in the prison.
But
at the time there was no such protocol, and as such she was placed in a
medical unit away from the other women in the general population. There
she was given access to a telephone and video conferencing, but said
she felt isolated and lonely.
Local residents staged a small protest in support of Taylor outside
the Drury Inn following news of her arrest. Pastor Megan Rohrer, who
heads Welcome, a San Francisco-based LGBT outreach program,
raised
over $5,500 to cover Taylor’s $2,000 bond and for fines related to an
earlier charge. The additional funds will be used to help Taylor pay for
her name change and an ID that matches her preferred gender identity.
“When I came out as transgender, I expected I would experience some
discrimination, but I didn’t know how strong it would be,” Taylor wrote.
“When something bad happens, I try to think about things and sort out
why they happened. When this all happened, I knew exactly what it was:
the racial profiling, the transgender profiling, the harassment, the
solitary confinement. I knew why it was happening, and I knew it wasn’t
right.”
The Drury Inn did not respond to a request for comment.
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