The following article has been submitted to GPAC by the ‘Safety4Harvey’ collective. The article describes the harsh and discriminatory prison conditions experienced by Vickreman Harvey Chettiar, who is an autistic Singaporean Tamil intersex transgender woman imprisoned in Singapore.
*Content Warning: Descriptions of sexual violence*
Vickreman Harvey Chettiar (Harvey) is an autistic Singaporean Tamil intersex transgender woman. She currently faces 12 criminal charges, many of which are the result of frame-ups, which is a story better traversed elsewhere. Regardless, she has the right to mount her defense to these twelve charges without having to compromise her own defense. Harvey had attempted but failed to attend multiple court dates due to medically significant panic attacks relating to past sexual trauma inflicted on her in the court building, and every instance of which led to her hospitalization. One of these instances led to her bail being revoked, along with her eventual arrest and remand in a male prison unit.
This article shall serve as documentation of the gross and unjust damage inflicted on Harvey in prison so far in pre-trial detention, and the prison’s utter insensitivity to the needs and rights of transgender people as well as the infirm, two positions which Harvey could be said to epitomize in one person. We demand Harvey’s immediate release on bail.
Road to remand
Harvey’s trial was originally scheduled for 5-7 March 2024. As Harvey’s bailor Carissa had witnessed and consequently called an ambulance, she collapsed and lost consciousness in the morning of the first day of the trial, due to shame from realizing she had, while intoxicated, threatened her fellow women including District Judge Teoh Ai Lin in prior email and electronic form submissions, which are the substance of her 5th to 7th charges, and panic over having to face District Judge Teoh, who would preside over her trial, after having made such threats. Harvey was conveyed by ambulance to National University Hospital, where she was hospitalized for the whole duration of the trial. For this, she later came to be served the first of her two “abscondment” charges.
The hospitalization forced the trial dates to be vacated, and the prosecution later filed an Application for Revocation of Bail, leading to a series of Bail Revocation Hearings. Curiously, District Judge Teoh continued to preside over the Hearings, even though she was the “victim” of the offenses in Harvey’s 5th to 7th charges. Harvey’s lawyer at the time, Chia Ti Lik, also did not pick up on this or apply for Teoh’s recusal on such grounds, despite being a trained lawyer.
Harvey was scheduled to have her second Bail Revocation Hearing on 22 March 2024. In anticipation of sitting in the dock at the State Courts, she experienced flashbacks of the physical and sexual violence inflicted on her by security officers during a previous arraignment at the basement of State Courts Tower on 5 May 2023, which is detailed in https://bit.ly/notomaleremand. This caused a wave of panic attacks which caused her to depart late for the Hearing. While on her way to the Hearing with Carissa, the Court had her bail revoked and a Warrant of Arrest issued against her. She alighted at a neighboring building to use the washroom and made an attempt to voluntarily surrender herself to the Court, but experienced another wave of flashbacks and consequent panic attacks, leaving her collapsed on the floor and unable to get up for over two hours. Eventually, an ambulance was called and she was sent to Singapore General Hospital, where she was warded until 26 March 2024. For this, she came to be served the second of her two “abscondment” charges.
Since then, Harvey made several more attempts to voluntarily surrender herself to the Court, but these were also not successful due to onset of anxiety/panic attacks.
The Warrant of Arrest came to be executed and Harvey arrested on 5 April 2024. She was remanded for pre-trial detention to Changi Prison Complex on 6 April 2024, and has remained there since.
Since then, Harvey has endured traumatizing and damaging conditions in prison, hitting especially hard at her status as a trans woman in a male prison environment, and at her physical infirmities.
On 14 June 2024, Harvey’s community and chosen family wrote and signed a Plea for Prosecutorial Compassion, to ask the prosecution to grant her bail. The Plea can be read at https://tinyurl.com/2hj66ky2. It documents the harsh conditions Harvey is enduring in prison.
Gender dysphoria and sexual suffering
As a transgender woman, Harvey was remanded to the male section of the prison, while being segregated from male inmates. Despite the segregation, she has been experiencing severe sexual traumas on a daily basis, exacerbated by her having been sexually traumatized by men since the age of ten, something she did not choose to experience and which no person should ever have to experience even once, let alone repeatedly.
During prison intake, Harvey, who has the intersex condition Klinefelter syndrome, was found to have testosterone levels lower than typical male levels. She was thus given 3 weekly Depo-Testosterone injections on 12, 19, and 26 April, until the prison was able to verify her gender dysphoria diagnosis with her clinic. The injections caused Harvey to grow more body hair than ever before, which subsequent feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has not seemed to be able to reverse. Her voice also further broke. All this is highly dysphoric for Harvey.
As part of the male prison environment, Harvey has to perform her bodily functions and maintain her personal hygiene in front of a security camera which is monitored by male prison officers as part of their professional duties. This is triggering to Harvey as a survivor of multiple sexual assaults committed against her by men, and she sobs quietly when she sits on the commode every night to shower. There is also a viewport on Harvey’s cell door which may be opened at any time by male prison officers as well as authorized male inmates, even while she is performing her bodily functions or maintaining her personal hygiene. A modesty wall in the cell does not fully enclose the toilet/shower area or block it from view of the cell or door viewport.
Despite being segregated from male inmates, Harvey is for virtually all intents and purposes treated by prison staff and prison policies as if she were a cisgender man. All prison officers, save for one, have consistently misgendered her throughout her incarceration. She is lawfully strip-searched by male prison officers during every out-of-cell movement, and these strip-searches cannot be refused or she would
incur a prison offense charge. While the male prison officers have objectively remained professional in carrying out the strip-searches, Harvey subjectively experiences each strip-search as a fresh sexual assault as the strip-searches are carried out by men. Any resistance to having to strip in front of male prison guards by her as a female remandee would be treated with suspicion accorded to a male remandee resisting such searches instead, and would become the basis for such male prison guards to be authorized to use force to carry out and complete the searches. Such use of force would place her in an extremely uncomfortable and distressing position and force her to have to resist even harder to prevent these male prison guards from violating her gender dignity and sexual safety. This creates the conditions for further stacks of charges of criminal and internal prison offenses to be brought against Harvey, inciting further punishment against her. This would create a vicious cycle of traumatization, resistance, and more charges.
Facial shaving is only allowed during yard time. However, as participation in yard time involves an out-of-cell movement, it also requires being subject to a strip-search by male prison officers. Harvey has thus opted out of yard time and thus been generally unable to shave her face, and the resultant facial hair growth is causing her severe gender dysphoria. The prison officers have occasionally allowed her to shave her facial hair in her cell, but this has only been on a few irregular occasions. Consequently, Harvey has been publicly displayed with facial hair in open Court via video-link, which piles on additional extreme dysphoria.
Soon after the Plea was released, the prison psychiatrist assessed Harvey. The psychiatrist deemed her to not be transgender because she “does not exhibit any of the traits of deference to men expected of women, but instead has consistently demonstrated psychotic male behavior”, and so they have consequently revoked her gender identity disorder diagnosis and instead diagnosed her with body dysmorphic disorder and adjustment disorder with psychosis. The misogyny is baffling, and speaks for itself. Needless to say, the prison has since stopped giving her HRT. Bail is more precious to a transgender woman than her life itself; as unlike for a man for whom being on bail is a matter of his liberty, for a transgender woman it is her sanity and sexual dignity.
Infirmity and autism
Harvey’s condition of myasthenia makes her unable to walk or stand for long. This physical disability is not catered for in prison, other than them providing her with a commode to aid her use of the squat toilet and wall-embedded shower-head in her cell. The prison cell has no grab-bars or other disability-friendly features.
On at least ten occasions so far when she lacked sufficient strength to pull herself to the toilet and onto the commode in time, she has ended up wetting herself and sitting in the puddle of urine for hours until she has rested enough to change into another set of clothes. This has also caused prison offence charges to be served to her for not maintaining hygiene/grooming standards, without regard for her circumstances.
In addition, since 5 April 2024, Harvey’s knees have no longer been able to support her physical body weight. She can no longer stand up on her own and now needs a wheelchair, which is not provided for use inside the prison cell itself, giving her no choice but to humiliatingly crawl on the floor of her prison cell. Her various pre-existing ailments such as osteoporosis and sarcopenia have been severely exacerbated in enduring the physical conditions of the prison cell.
Harvey only has access to basic medical care 9-to-5 on weekdays, not round-the-clock medical care as asserted by Prosecution. This basic medical care still remains subject to unusual limitations such as being denied cough syrup when she has the common cold as it may be addictive, and being denied her long-standing prescription of 10 milligrams of diazepam nightly to treat her anxiety.
The standard prison attire of thin white t-shirt and brown shorts with no undergarments, along with the thin straw mat provided for Harvey to sleep on the concrete floor of the cell, provide barely any cushioning, and have over a prolonged period taken their toll on her limbs, shoulders, and especially her skinny back. After 33 years of smoothness, patches of skin on her back, torso and forearms have become rough and uneven, in addition to heat rashes caused by heat and humidity in the cell. Harvey estimates the ambient temperature in the cell to be 34-42 degrees Celsius (93-108 degrees Fahrenheit).
Many of these sensory effects are especially intensified for her as an autistic person with heightened sensory processing compared to a neurotypical person, which causes her to experience more intensely the resultant damaging effects from the sum total of these already-damaging experiences of daily agonizing sexual humiliation and the consequent loss of her sexual dignity, physical discomfort and bodily degeneration, and other psychological trauma including permanent, irreversible damage.
Irreversible damage
Some time after the release of the Plea for Prosecutorial Compassion, Harvey underwent a medical review. It revealed the devastating, lasting consequences that the prison environment has inflicted on her body.
Prior to being remanded, Harvey had been carefully managing her diet to manage her health. She had kept her cholesterol intake low for the past 15 years, but the high-cholesterol diet in prison has caused visceral fat to accumulate around her organs, which will be tough to reverse. She had been substituting salt with monosodium glutamate (MSG), but the high-salt diet in prison has damaged her kidneys such that she is irreversibly unable to take spironolactone, an anti-androgen for her HRT. The prison diet has also wrecked her digestion and given her difficulty with yeast, so she can no longer consume bake goods, such as bread, as she used to.
Meanwhile, the heated air in her prison cell that she breathes in daily has aggravated her pre-existing heart issues. Her heart is thus irreversibly damaged, not just preventing her from being able to take cyproterone acetate, another common HRT anti-androgen, but also preventing her from being able to undergo general anesthesia as it would cause her heart to stop. This is dangerous in general as it precludes one from undergoing any potentially needed life-saving surgeries that require general anesthesia, but for Harvey is particularly damaging as this permanently precludes her from undergoing many forms of gender-affirming surgeries.
Finally, the prison enforces a “male calorie intake” on Harvey, and not finishing her food is not an option because they will force-feed her if so. This has caused Harvey to gain 11kg of weight. If she does not lose this weight and return to her pre-incarceration range, her heart is estimated by the prison doctor to have another 10 to 15 years of functioning, after which there could be fatal complications. When asked how she is supposed to lose this extra weight she never wanted to put on, the prison doctor had no answer.
In fact, on 15 July 2024, Harvey was rushed to the Changi General Hospital’s Angiographies Unit after her heart started acting up, and has since been brought back. It is not clear how much longer her heart will last under the current prison conditions.
The prison is currently looking to put Harvey in a punishment cell for 14 days, and subject her to 9 strokes of the cane (which women are exempt from in Singapore), as punishment for resisting strip-searches. This can happen anytime from 30 July onward, and Harvey would only be informed right before it happens with no advance warning. For Harvey, caning would involve exposing her buttocks to a male prison officer, and that combined with the caning itself would be highly reminiscent of the sexual violence she experienced on 5 May 2023, where among other things, male security officers manhandled her buttocks to the point of digital penetration of her anus during a strip-search.
Furthermore, caning is a lawful sanction, so in arguing against granting Harvey bail on the grounds of infirmity, the prosecution will likely argue that the infirmities described here only arose as a result of the caning.
Conclusion
Harvey’s experience exemplifies how prisons do not rehabilitate or reform, but rather deepen cycles of harm and trauma. Prison has taken from Harvey her dignity, health, current and future medical transition, and even lifespan, giving her in return lasting trauma that will take decades to overcome. All this damage has been done in pre-trial detention before any sentence has been passed, while the continuing daily
traumas impede Harvey from mounting a clear-headed defense. She is being treated as guilty until proven innocent. To call this justice would be a gross perversion.
Vickreman Harvey Chettiar must be given bail and released immediately.
#Justice4Harvey #Safety4Harvey #FreeHarveyChettiar
If you would like to support Harvey’s legal defense and physical and mental recovery, please consider donating at https://tiny.cc/FreeHarveyFundraiser