DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Kristin Schreier Lyseggen to the store to discuss and sign The Women of San Quentin: Soul Murder of Transgender Women in Male Prisons on Thursday, October 1st at 6:30pm.

These are the true accounts told by nine transgender women in the male US prison system, women who grew up never feeling safe, who were surrounded by others telling them that they should be "normal", and that their deepest sense of who they were was an error. As the number of transgender people coming out reaches levels we never before dreamed of, author Kristin Schreier Lyseggen hopes this book will shed some light on the needs of people locked up twice in their lives. She started writing this book as soon as she moved to California from Norway, just before we learned that Private Bradley Manning was Chelsea Manning and before the popular Netflix TV show Orange Is the New Black. In real life, most women with gender identity issues, when jailed, are put in male prisons with notorious predators. The only options for many of them in order to survive is to live isolated in cages, or become sex slaves for other inmates.

Kristin Schreier Lyseggen trained as a journalist and photographer in Oslo, Birmingham, Bangkok and San Francisco. She is now based in Berkeley, California working on long-term independent projects with her husband, child psychiatrist Herb Schreier, including a film on sexual abuse and human trafficking, and a book about transgender youth in rural areas and townships of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Kristin is also the author of The Boy Who Was Not a Lesbian.