My Life Is Too Dark To See the Light | страница 45

transgender identity. After Xiao Tong was taken to the police station:
“Once I went in, they pulled on my wig, really hard, and hit me. They asked me if
I was a man, and I said I wasn’t. Then they carried out a body search and flipped
my bra up and groped around. They asked really perverted questions, like, how
do you have sex. I turned around and asked, do you want to try? Then he kicked
me, really, he really kicked me.”153
Xiao Qiang said a police officer sat on her back and crushed her breasts:
“That time another girl and I were just coming out of a hotel, and we ran into
some cops. Maybe our get-up wasn’t right that night and our skirts were too
short, and that attracted their attention. The cops examined us and went through
our bags, and when they found money and condoms they took us away. When
we got to the police station, one cop told me to lie on the floor with my chest
to the ground, and then he sat on my back. I had breast implants, and I felt like
they were about to explode. That cop was really fat, and he pulled my hair.”154
Yanyan said police officers beat her when she refused to admit to sex work:
“I said I wouldn’t admit to that, so they hit me really hard. They used police
batons and belts and hit my face and my body. They kept brainwashing me,
saying they’d stop hitting me if I confessed, but if I didn’t admit it, they’d keep
hitting me. Finally they’d beaten me until I couldn’t think straight, and when they
saw that, they stopped hitting me and forcibly took my fingerprints.”155
Xiao Qing in Shanghai believes the police sometimes arrest her even when she hasn’t
done anything, just so they can meet a quota: “There’s a lot of people like us who
haven’t even done anything, and are just standing on the street or maybe ducking out
of the rain, and the police come over and arrest us without even asking any questions.
By rights, they can’t arrest us under those circumstances. I wasn’t soliciting clients
or selling sex. I said, this is the way I live, you have to let me go. That policeman said
they were given strict assignments and their station chief had ordered them to make
arrests.”156
Lack of training on gender issues and a lack of appropriate facilities, means that
153 Ibid.
154 Interview with Xiao Qiang, Beijing, March 20, 2014.
155 Interview with Yanyan, Shanghai, June 16, 2014.
156 Interview with Xiao Qing, Shanghai, April 29, 2014.

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