August Stuckey’s military-minded father drove the car to a part of town in Tampa Bay where he had never been. He pulled over near children milling around on the streets with nowhere to go.
He pointed them out. August too would be homeless if he continued his girly ways, his father said. The moment stuck with August, who was 7 at the time.
This moment came about after August, who now goes by Holly, attended her older brother’s baseball game with her family. Everyone piled into her father’s Cadillac after the game and went to McDonald’s for burgers and fries. There was her father and mother, her brother, and her little sister. Her brother’s friend, the baseball coach’s son, came along too. His name was Tommy.
After they returned to the luxury condo in a Tampa Bay cul-de-sac where she and her family lived, Holly sat on her parents’ bed and drew because she liked the lighting in their bedroom. Holly welcomed Tommy, a popular kid who she liked, when he walked into the room.
That is when Tommy took his dick out, telling Holly to touch it, then kiss it, then put it in her mouth. As Holly remembers it, she liked the taste, the smell of the older boy. She remembers losing herself in the moment.
Then the door swung open. In walked Holly’s father, who yelled at Tommy to get out of his house. At the time, Holly did not understand what the problem was.
After Tommy left, Holly sat on the bed, unable to articulate her feelings. Her father told the rest of the family what happened. Her mother wanted to know if this had happened before. Her brother blamed her for the whole thing. He said that Tommy was not gay, and that Holly had obviously enticed him.
Until then, Holly’s world had consisted of art—drawing cartoons based on the Ninja Turtles and reading comic strips including Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes. Drawing was the one thing that allowed her to socialize with the other kids. Other than that, Holly, who had no friends, was always alone.
In third grade, after Holly took that car ride with her father, a teacher, Mrs. Elfrink, noticed that she learned at a slower pace than her peers. She told Holly’s parents. Testing revealed that she processed things differently, thinking in visual terms, translating words into images before she could understand them. Holly was diagnosed with autism and anxiety.
Mrs. Elfrink put together a special program for Holly that catered to her learning style, nurturing both her artistic talent and her tremendous ability to focus completely on one subject. The two of them worked every day together. Holly liked school and looked forward to going.
Then one day, her father had an announcement: He was moving the family from Tampa Bay to Fort Bragg, a small city on the coast of Northern California. Holly did not want to go.
Her fears were founded. The new place was nothing like Tampa Bay. The teachers at the new school paid little attention to her. She was constantly bullied and often sat by herself, crying. Her fellow classmates played a game called “Smear the Queer,” victimizing anyone who didn’t pass as masculine. A year-long stint in homeschooling didn’t help. Holly sank into depression and tried to become invisible. She began having nightmares about what her father had warned her about—being homeless on the streets. Her parents sent her to therapy, but Holly wouldn’t open up, fearing that what she said would get back to her father.
Instead, she acted like the person she thought her father wanted her to be. Her father told her to join the wrestling team, whose members included bullies, but also cute guys. She would let the cute guys pin her and win. But if the guy had bullied her, she would try to hurt him and win the match.
Holly grew. She felt strange, awkward, and unnatural, but told no one. She preferred solitude, and hoping to free herself of the daily torment of her peers, she applied herself to her studies, envisioning a different life beyond graduation. Art became her lifeline. She was active in art club until she left school during her sophomore year. That’s when she passed a state exam that allowed her to graduate early. At the local community college, she studied computer science, then switched to art.
Holly began seeing a tall, blond, blue-eyed man of her dreams. She’d met Mike Johnson years before. He was easy to talk to. Like a lot of the teenagers around her, he liked sex, getting high, and hanging out. But it was her first time doing those things with anyone. She had never had anyone to hang out with before. She fell in love with him. She believed the feeling was mutual.
Johnson made love to her in a way that felt natural and terrific, like she was a woman. Holly felt loved and appreciated for the first time in her life. She became more confident, vocal, self-assured, and adventurous. She worked a part-time job on the weekends as a house painter, and she no longer shied away from meeting people for fear of rejection. In Mike Johnson’s world, Holly felt she belonged.
She did all she could to win acceptance from Johnson and his friends. She ran errands, cleaned up after them wherever they were hanging out, bought them things. She even studied books on sex and watched porn to develop the skills to please Johnson. Johnson and his buddies were goth. Holly began dressing in all black, smoking a lot of weed, and listening to the music they liked. She also carried bear spray because they did. Just before graduation, Holly’s plans to quickly finish school hit a snag. Holly was caught carrying the bear spray on campus. She was suspended from school and placed on house arrest.
Then Johnson became inaccessible. He was never at home or at any of his regular hangouts. When she did manage to get Johnson on the phone, he could never talk long. He always had somewhere to be. Holly suspected infidelity. Johnson called her paranoid.
Despite house arrest, Holly snuck out, and she found that Johnson indeed had a girlfriend. She knocked on the door at the girlfriend’s house and confronted Johnson, but he shut the door in her face. Holly felt like a fool. She called Johnson but he refused to talk. She snuck out for liquor and started getting black-out drunk in her room. She was 18 years old.
She stopped eating and lost interest in her art. She fantasized about Johnson returning, pleading for forgiveness, and the ensuing make-up sex.
She sought someone new online. She found Donald Perez. He was tall, handsome, muscular, in his 30s, and a Marine.
They talked for hours on end by phone. Perez acted like he understood her and she grew comfortable with him. Holly was now able to imagine a future without Johnson.
Perez pressured her for a face-to-face meeting. Fearing he would lose interest if she delayed, Holly agreed to meet at a motel.
He was everything he presented himself to be, but the sex was terrible—nothing like the sex with Johnson. Perez touched Holly’s penis, something she was not used to. Johnson never did that, she recalls. Holly was a woman and wanted to be treated like one.
Holly ran crying from the motel room out onto the street, confused. Johnson had left her for another woman. Now her new lover did not see her as one. She ran all the way to Sacramento. The river reminded her of Tampa Bay. With no money and no hustle, she found a place behind a Presbyterian church to sleep, in a ditch where she could not be seen. Her father’s words when she was 7 came back to her—the warning that her girly ways would lead to her becoming homeless. She started cutting herself.
After a few weeks on the streets, she became resolute and went home to Fort Bragg. But she failed to win back Johnson. He didn’t want to pick up where they’d left off, but said he did not mind getting his dick sucked every now and then.
The realization that she and Johnson were never, as she’d imagined, madly in love, was too much to bear. Suicidal and often drunk, she sought out and clung to Johnson’s friends, Tai and Aaron. They hung, got high.
Holly became angry. She considered killing Johnson. But it wasn’t realistic. She needed help for that, and neither Tai nor Aaron would go along with the idea. She turned her vengeful thoughts to Perez, whom she resented for his failure to rescue her from heartbreak.
She told Tai and Aaron that Perez manipulated her, and that all he wanted was sex. Tai and Aaron agreed that Perez was a dog, and that he had taken advantage of her. One day, as Holly recalls, they were sitting around getting high as usual at Tai’s apartment, and Holly asked them: If they were her friends, were they just going to sit around and let Perez get away with what he had done? Or were they going to get some payback?
Holly said she got back in touch with Perez, telling him she was sorry for running out. She recalls luring Perez to a wooded, secluded area just outside of Fort Bragg with the promise of makeup sex. The trap was sprung. Tai and Aaron attacked, she said. They’d planned to torture him, but they went too far, she said. They ended up killing Perez.
At first, she recalls, they were all proud of what they had done. They hurried to tell Johnson. Johnson didn’t believe them, she said, so they showed him where they hid the body. The trio was arrested and charged with murder.
During questioning by the police, officers asked Holly about the motive for the killing. She had no explanation. How do you tell the police you killed someone because they did not rescue you or make love to you like you were a woman?
Tai got life without parole, while Aaron pled guilty to manslaughter and took a deal for more than a decade in state prison. Holly got 15 years to life.
Holly’s poor social skills, autism, and anxiety made it hard to integrate into her new community at San Quentin State Prison. She was clearly no regular. Fellow inmates picked on her, like when she was back in school, but this time there was no place to hide. When she went to chow for meals, other people would take her tray. She would often go to bed hungry.
One time, in the intake center, a guy harassed Holly by taking her food. The shot-caller for the white group noticed, and told Holly she had three choices: stab the guy, be the guy’s bitch, or get stabbed herself.
Drawing on her wrestling background, Holly fought the guy. She got put in the hole for it, but had earned the respect of the white prison community. In the hole, she shaved her head, trying to appear more masculine. A fellow incarcerated person nicknamed her “Nermal,” after the gray cat from Garfield that no one could tell was a boy or a girl.
Holly knew that she could not fool everybody for long. and was terrified she would be passed around from one guy to the other. When she appeared before the classification committee, she asked to be placed on a sensitive needs yard. SNY is set aside for people who face threats from the general population. It’s largely made up of people convicted of rape and child molestation—people afraid of everyday prison life. By 2018, about 33,000 inmates, a quarter of California’s entire prison population, lived in SNYs. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation started phasing out these yards in 2018 because of escalating violence. Despite their ostensible purpose, the homicide rate in SNYs had been two to three times the rate in the general population yards.
Prison officials sent Holly to SNY in 2002 at Salinas Valley State Prison. Trans women were housed at men’s facilities because the prison system considers them men, and though there were other trans women in the yard, she feared she would not be accepted if she came out as a woman herself. Holly walked to the group on the yard and hung out with them to learn the ropes, but she felt out of place. They all seemed so worldly. Never having used hard drugs or lived as a woman on the streets, she realized that she did not have much in common with the women in her yard. It was not her gender, but her background.
She had always lived at home and hid her sexuality from everyone except Johnson, Tai, Aaron, and Perez. The other women were out in the open, flaunting their sexuality. They turned tricks, selling sex to support themselves. Or they became the property of someone who could protect them—could be passed around like a pair of shoes.
She didn’t reveal to the women that she was autistic, so they just thought that she was odd, and that she liked to hang out with trans women.
One day, Holly’s cellmate decided to blackmail her. He threatened to tell everyone that they were sleeping together. Holly paid him with the proceeds she made from selling her art, and she kept paying him to keep quiet.
Not long after, her cellmate wanted to actually have sex with her. He showed her a knife and told her to get undressed and lay on the bunk. Once again she drew on her wrestling skills. Holly took the knife, tied him up with his sheets and reported the incident to staff.
In 2009, authorities transferred Holly to a SNY at Ironwood State Prison. She continued to obscure herself. At Ironwood, she took a class in masonry, the most masculine-appearing vocational trade on offer.
One day while reading a medical book at the library at Soledad State Prison in Monterey County, where she had been transferred, Holly came across a piece of information that helped guide the rest of her life. The medical text referenced what was at the time an exceedingly rare sociological study on trans people, a book called Transsexualism in Society by the author Frank Lewins.
Holly ordered the book. It detailed instructions on coping and information about gender and sexuality. She read it over just a few days, obscuring the cover with a brown paper bag so people couldn’t see the title.
For the first time in her life, Holly understood why she was the way she was. She had gender dysphoria—excessive pain, anguish, and agitation that can occur in people whose gender differs from their sex assigned at birth. Following the instructions in the book, she began to prepare to live her life as a woman, buying women’s clothing and stockpiling makeup. She privately chose a new name for her new outlook: Holly.
Holly developed a sense of destiny and felt connected to it. She enrolled in self-help therapy programs. She even enrolled in college, but it brought back too many bad memories.
In the coming years, Holly would meet mentors, and get aggressive with the state. Whether through formal grievance processes, or personal protests like hunger strikes, she pushed prison authorities to change the way trans women are searched, the types of clothing they could wear. She also tried to reconcile with her family. But during the phone call, as she stood in San Quentin’s phone booth, their message was clear: as long as she was a woman, she would not be welcome. She appeared before the Board of Parole Hearings. In the Spring of 2020, she was released into the pandemic.
She’d envisioned a job, a motorcycle, her own place. Instead, she remained anxious, and continued to struggle with relationships and homelessness. But there’s some light now. She plans to get back into illustration. She finally understands her past, which makes her future clearer. A grown woman has emerged, ready to take her place in the world, tested by fire.
Good luck, Holly. ▩
