Missouri Wrote the Torture of Trans People Into Its Prison Budget. The People It Caged Are Writing Back.

There is a desk in a St. Louis grammar school that held Maya Angelou before it held Da’Shae Breeze. Her teacher was the one who told her, and Angelou’s childhood home stood along her daily walk to school, “reminding me that greatness was not far away,” she remembers. “It was within my reach.”

Breeze grew up to become a published writer, with bylines at the Prison Journalism Project and in movement newsletters that pass hand to hand across the country.

She writes now from a solitary confinement cell, what the Missouri Department of Corrections calls administrative segregation, where she continues to correspond with The Defender on a monitored tablet. And on July 2, the State of Missouri cut off the medicine she calls the air she breathes.

That is the entire provision. One sentence, tucked beneath line items for food storage and overtime pay on the last page of a 20-page budget bill. Missouri tried to pass it before, and a trans woman named Jessica Hicklin defeated it from inside a maximum security prison. The state passed the new law anyway.

Far-right Governor Mike Kehoe signed House Bill 2009, the appropriations bill funding the Missouri Department of Corrections, on June 30, and it took effect July 2. There is no grandfather clause for the trans people already receiving hormone therapy inside Missouri’s prisons. There is no plan to taper anyone off their medication. There is no medical protocol at all. People who have been on hormones for years, some of whom have undergone gender-affirming surgery and whose bodies can no longer produce hormones on their own, will simply wake up in a cell and find their medication gone.

I call this what it is: state-sanctioned torture, and I don’t say this as a rhetorical device. The United Nations’ Mandela Rules, the international minimum standard for the treatment of prisoners, prohibit prolonged solitary confinement outright and bar its use entirely on people whose medical conditions it would worsen. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture concluded in 2011 that solitary confinement beyond 15 days constitutes torture, and in 2020 said its prolonged use in American prisons amounts to psychological torture.

Fifty years ago, in Estelle v. Gamble, the Supreme Court held that deliberate indifference to a prisoner’s serious medical needs is cruel and unusual punishment. Missouri is doing both at once to Da’Shae Breeze: isolating a woman with a diagnosed medical condition while withholding the only treatment federal courts have recognized for it.

And it’s not only Da’Shae. The state has ordered the forced detransition of every trans person in its custody, a punishment no court imposed, no jury deliberated, and no law previously allowed.

“I thought I would die when they told me I would no longer receive care,” Breeze told The Defender through the prison’s monitored messaging system. “But women don’t fold that easy. They get bold.”

A Medical Crisis Written Into Law

The medical community is not divided on what happens next. Clinicians warn that abruptly cutting off hormone therapy can cause severe bone density loss, cardiovascular complications, metabolic dysfunction, cognitive decline, and profound psychological distress. For people who have had gender-affirming surgery and no longer have their original gonads, hormone withdrawal is a full-body medical crisis. Their bodies cannot compensate. The state knows this too. The Department of Corrections has provided this care since 2018 precisely because Jessica Hicklin forced it to.

Hicklin spent 26 years inside Missouri prisons and won the federal ruling that made this care law. “It is medically necessary, life-saving healthcare, and it abruptly stops. It is immediately dangerous to your health,” she told The Defender. “It is like somebody who had cancer and was on chemotherapy, and midway through treatment, you just stopped it.” The physical danger arrives first, she said, and then something worse settles in behind it. “You have not only been abandoned by the medical establishment and the people who are responsible for your care. You are being thrown away.”

Breeze began hormone therapy in 2024.

Now the state has ended her treatment with no plan, no timeline, and no answers.

“No one gives me guidance on what to expect as I transition, nor what to expect when my care runs out. It is care that amounts to no care at all,” she wrote. “I am constantly afraid of what lies ahead. Is this the end? Will I die, since my body won’t be able to produce estrogen and my immune system won’t function at full capacity? I am afraid that any preexisting condition will be exacerbated and I will succumb to an awful illness, mental or physical.”

“I Am Honestly Worried We Are Going to Lose Some of These Folks”

By Hicklin’s count, 43 trans people are receiving this care inside Missouri prisons right now. She wants the public to hear what the state’s message to them actually says. “They have had their identity stolen, their care stolen, and the definitive message that you are powerless to do anything about it,” she said. “I am honestly worried that we are going to lose some of these folks.”

She does not say that abstractly. Five months ago, Hicklin lost a trans friend to suicide. Her friend was not incarcerated but the daily weight of surviving as a trans person in this country was too much to carry. Hicklin paused when she spoke about her, and apologized for the emotion in her voice. Her grief is evidence. If the free world is already this dangerous for trans people, what does Missouri believe will happen to the people locked inside its prisons, stripped of their medicine, and told by their government that their existence is a budget error?

“Being Black and Trans in Prison Is Very Hard. But It Is Also a Blessing.”

Breeze describes her survival the way a writer does. “I want people to know that being Black and trans in prison is very hard,” she wrote. “But it is also a blessing. I open doors. I am always visible and pleasing to others’ sight. I make them accept and love me. In a dangerous land, I am safe. I take great strides to show people I am economical and industrious. My work is not in vain. In a place where trans people are raped and beaten, I have peace that surpasses all understanding.”

The Woman Who Beat Missouri From Inside Potosi

The law Breeze is living under is illegal, and the person who proved it has a name. Jessica Hicklin entered Potosi Correctional Center at 18. She came out as trans inside those walls, was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, was prescribed hormone therapy, and then was denied it for years under the DOC’s “freeze-frame” policy, which barred treatment for anyone who had not started transitioning before incarceration. The denial drove her to panic attacks, suicidal ideation, and the edge of self-harm. She fought back anyway, with Lambda Legal, the national LGBTQ civil rights legal organization, at her side, and in 2018 she won. In Hicklin v. Precythe, a federal judge ruled that denying trans prisoners medically necessary care violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The state never appealed. For eight years, it has been settled law in Missouri, won by a woman the state believed it had erased.

Hicklin walked out of prison in 2022 after a separate legal fight over juvenile life sentences, and the life she has built since reads like an indictment of every year the state took from her. She co-founded Unlocked Labs, a nonprofit building education infrastructure inside prisons, carried it into seven states, and now advises Lambda Legal, the organization that stood beside her in federal court. “I tell people I live a life I don’t know how I lived,” she said from her home in St. Louis.

She learned about the budget line in the middle of consulting work with Missouri LGBTQ organizations. “Aggravating doesn’t begin to cover it,” she said. “Why are we spending so much time and so many resources further oppressing one percent of the population? My community has become a political token.” Still, Hicklin is resolved. “It galvanizes me,” she said. “If we are going to do this again, we will do it again.”

They Knew It Was Unconstitutional

State Representative Dirk Deaton, a backbench extremist from the Ozarks who sponsored HB 2009 and inserted the ban, knows all of this. On the House floor in March, he acknowledged the federal ruling requiring this care, then explained that the Eighth Circuit has seen “a lot of appointments” and “a lot of change” and that he believed conditions had shifted enough to try again. This is a lawmaker admitting, in public, on the record, that he is enacting a policy the courts have already declared unconstitutional because he is betting that a remade judiciary will bless it this time. Legislators were told directly by the DOC’s director that federal circuit courts have been consistent in ruling that denying this care violates the Constitution. The supermajority passed it anyway. The House voted 107 to 39. The Senate passed it without a single dissenting voice.

Breeze has questions. “If I could talk to Representative Deaton, who sponsored the bill, I would ask him: Why are you so worried about something that does not affect you personally? Did you do any research to find out the real, true benefits of this care, or was this a rash decision made due to political ideation?”

“You Cannot Legislate From a Budget”

In 2020, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down a provision in an appropriations bill that began with the same five words as this one, “No funds shall be expended,” calling it a naked attempt to legislate through a budget bill in violation of Article III, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution. That case involved lawmakers trying to defund Planned Parenthood through a budget rider. The court severed the provision and threw it out. The new anti-trans provision is built on the same forbidden architecture, and Hicklin’s point carries a practical edge that should worry Jefferson City: “Every single citizen in the state can go to court and say, wait a minute. You used a budget bill to change the law, and you are doing it to harm my loved ones.”

For the families of those inside, she offered two instructions. The first is connection. “Let your loved ones know that you care about them,” she said. “They are going to feel more isolated and alone than they have in a very long time, and the connection matters. It really matters.” The second is refusal. This is being done in your name, she said, with your taxes. “Fight. Don’t accept it.”

The Prison Is the Proving Ground

We name this plainly because the prison has always served this function. It is where the state tests what it can do to the people it has already rendered disposable. Trans people, and Black trans people most of all, are policed, criminalized, and caged at rates far beyond their share of the population, then subjected inside to violence and isolation that would scandalize the public if it happened anywhere else. A state that can withhold life-sustaining medicine from a captive person as a matter of fiscal policy is a state rehearsing what it will eventually attempt on the outside. The new provision was written for a few dozen people. Its ambition is much larger.

The Fight Has Already Begun

And still, people are fighting. Missouri advocacy organizations like PROMO are tracking the law and the litigation it invites, because Deaton’s confession on the House floor is a roadmap for the Eighth Amendment challenge to come, and Hicklin’s budget argument hands every Missourian a second way to challenge it. In Kansas City, organizers with the Party for Socialism and Liberation released a public statement within days of the signing, calling for solidarity between those on the outside with our incarcerated trans comrades.

Allies and organizers can also connect through national networks like Black & Pink connect people on the outside directly with incarcerated LGBTQ people through letter writing, because the state’s power depends on isolation and a letter is a crack in the wall.

Hicklin has now been fighting for 26 years. “I don’t know how to give up,” she said. “It’s not courage. I am well aware of what comes next, and giving up is giving in to loss and no hope for a future. I cannot sit down and look around and say I could have done something, and I didn’t.”

And Breeze, from inside, is doing what this newspaper’s ancestors did: turning survival into literature. “Writing means the world to me,” she wrote. “It is a way to express myself in a positive way, to use every platform accessible to show the world how awesome I am and my people are.” When The Defender told her our readers deserved to hear her voice, she wrote back that “it made me feel like a human being, like my inherent dignity was being restored.”

Hicklin won the first time from a cell in Potosi, without a movement watching, without a public that knew her name. Breeze is writing from inside right now, knowing exactly who is watching. The people inside Missouri’s prisons tonight are not without precedent and they are not without us. The state wrote one sentence to disappear them. Da’Shae Breeze wrote one that will outlive any effort from the statehouse floor: “I am an American trans woman of color who is happy she exists.”

Her final words in this story belong to the readers.