| The first person she came out to as transgender was her pen pal in New Zealand. Incarcerated in a men’s prison in Washington state, facing a sentence of life without parole, she had no idea how or when she could safely present as female, but choosing her name felt like a good first step. Her pen pal recommended she start by writing down names she liked and crossing off those she didn’t want to use.
She was drawn to “Guinevere” because of her Celtic ancestry, but she could never remember how it was spelled. She liked “Wren,” but felt that naming herself after a small, twitchy brown bird was a bit too on the nose. She landed on “Amber,” the name of her favorite stone. Made from fossilized tree resin, it’s one of the few precious gems that was once a living thing.
As a child, Amber Kim kept her hair long and jumped at the chance to wear her sister’s clothes when they played dress-up. She realized at a very young age that she was “no good at being a boy but not allowed to be a girl,” she told a psychiatrist during a 2022 evaluation. “She felt that the way she had to move through the world was a ‘lie,’” the psychiatrist noted in his evaluation report.
Kim’s conservative Christian parents sometimes mocked her for being too effeminate, she said, and at times punished her with physical violence. Some of her earliest memories are of her father beating her with a leather belt. Her mother would stand nearby and count the lashings — usually between 20 and 25, Kim told the psychiatrist. The beatings continued once or twice a week until she was 13 and began to fight back, she said, which eventually resulted in time in juvenile detention. She still has scars across her back: her “tiger stripes,” as she calls them.
When Kim was 14, her father found women’s clothing in her bedroom. He called her into a room where he was cleaning his guns to discuss his discovery. It was the first time she felt he had implicitly threatened to kill her, she told the psychiatrist.
Kim became depressed, anxious and suicidal. She sometimes hid out in the woods for days and repeatedly tried to move out, but her parents blocked her each time. In December 2006, during her senior year of high school, she and her father got into a fight over her failed attempt to move out. At one point, she told the psychiatrist that her father told her, “You are my child and I will do with you what I please, and that includes putting you in the ground if I damn well please.” It felt like a threat.
Kim fatally stabbed her father and killed her mother when she returned home. Kim, 18 at the time, was sentenced to die in prison. Her plans of coming out now seemed impossible.
Throughout the country, transgender people are facing an assault on their right to exist. Depending on where they live, they can be blocked from accessing life-saving gender-affirming health care, being identified by their correct name and pronouns, playing sports and even using public restrooms. But being transgender in prison is uniquely difficult because of the near-total control the state exercises over the people in its custody — including their housing, health care, jobs, clothing and even relationships. |
