Taliyah Murphy poses for a portrait outside the Denver City and County Building before a hearing on Jan. 4, 2023. Murphy is part of a class-action lawsuit that seeks to improve the safety and medical treatment of trans women in Colorado prisons. (Moe Clark for KFF Health News)
This story originally appeared in KFF Health News .
DENVER — Taliyah Murphy received a letter in early 2018 about a soon-to-be-filed class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of transgender women like her who were housed in men’s prisons in Colorado. It gave her hope.
Murphy and other trans women in Colorado had faced years of sexual harassment and often violence from staff members and fellow incarcerated people. They were denied requests for safer housing options and medical treatment, including surgery, for gender dysphoria, the psychological distress that some trans people experience because of the incongruence between their sex assigned at birth and their gender identity, according to the lawsuit.
“We were targets for victimizing, whether it was sexual assault, extortion, you name it,” said Murphy, who was released from prison in 2020. Most of the time, she added, “The guards just looked the other way.”