It’s a Woman’s World

[Butterfly]

It's a Woman's World
By Stephen Dark
02 February, 2011


http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-13196-itrss-a-womanrss-world.html 🔗


Damaso Davila-Escobedo currently calls home a single cell in the maximum-security wing of the Salt Lake County Metro Jail. The undocumented Mexican national is scheduled to be released in mid-April after serving six months for a probation violation. Housed in the male section of the jail, Davila-Escobedo is, she says in Spanish, "a male with female body parts," notably breasts she started developing when she was a teenager through injecting cooking oil into her chest and taking hormones.

She fled Mexico because of ridicule and violence, only to encounter, she says, similar treatment in the Salt Lake County Metro Jail. She says she was transferred from minimum to maximum security after she filed a complaint that on Dec. 7, 2010, guards harassed her, forcing her to strip, along with another male inmate, and making comments such as one asking "if it has hair on its nuts?" or "whose turn [among the inmates] to sleep with it tonight?"