Digital Transgender Archive

Interview with Hailey Ockinga

An interview with Hailey A Ockinga, an Alaskan Native / Tlingit trans woman, anti-incarceration activist, and community organizer based in Washington state. At the time of this interview, she was Executive Director of Beyond These Walls, a direct support and political advocacy organization run by and for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated transgender and gender nonconforming people in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to her role with Beyond These Walls, Ockinga was a leader in a wave of successful prisoner organizing from within a Washington state prison. In this oral history interview with Myra Billund-Phibbs, Ockinga discusses her conservative upbringing, her time in prison and how it led her to live openly as transgender, her organizing within prison, and how that organizing and her re-entry led her to work with Beyond These Walls. Specifically, she discusses the campaigns waged by her and other transgender women from within prison and the changes won through that work, her and Beyond These Walls' politics around partial prison abolition, reforms, and an overhaul of the re-entry system, the experiences of herself and other formerly incarcerated trans women as they re-enter society, the work Beyond These Walls does in trans incarcerated and formerly incarcerated communities, the importance of having impacted people leading organizations, and the impact of the COVID pandemic on Beyond These Walls' work.