Was a Transgender Australian Woman Murdered in a Male Prison?
by Michael A. Jones June 28, 2010 03:25 PM (PT)
http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/was_a_transgender_australian_woman_murdered_in_a_male_prisonIn March 2009, Veronica Baxter was arrested by police in Redfern, Australia, a suburb of Sydney. The charge? Drugs, and specifically, six counts of supplying a prohibited drug. The day was March 10. It was the last day that anyone outside of a prison cell would see Veronica Baxter alive.
After her arrest, Veronica was taken into custody by police. She was an indigenous transgender woman, having dressed, appeared and identified as a woman for 15 years. Her family and friends knew her as a woman.
You might think, therefore, that if police were going to keep Veronica Baxter in prison, that they would put her in an all-female prison. That is, after all, the policy of the New South Wales (NSW) government, which says that transgender inmates should be placed in custody in the jail of their choosing. It's right there on the books: "Any person received into the custody of the NSW Department of Corrective Services (DCS) who self-identifies as transgender has the right to be housed in a correctional facility appropriate to their gender or identification."
