Timeline

• In custody since 31 May 2024: Cleo is accused of murder
• Nine-day trial: Cleo was proven not to have been at the scene of the crime, but the surveillance camera footage showing her at a bus stop far away from the scene was rejected as evidence due to formalities. Cleo’s trans identity is constantly addressed, discussed and rejected during the trial. Although Cleo changed her name and gender entry in accordance with the SBG, she is misgendered. How she determines her medical transition and thus her own body is used as evidence against her womanhood. In the course of the trial, an expert opinion also denies her transfeminity.
• 16.04.25: Sentenced to 12 years and 8 months in prison in a men’s prison by the Potsdam Regional Court

Cleo, a Black trans woman from South Africa, was placed in a prison that does not recognise her gender identity, like so many other gender-nonconforming people in the prison system. She has been in pre-trial detention since 31 May 2024 after being arrested on the basis of suspicions that appear to be influenced by racial profiling and transmisogynoir.
Prisons still operate according to a hyper-gendered binary system. Just as trans people face disproportionate threats of violence in everyday life, they also face them behind bars. The medical needs of a trans person also differ from those of a cis person and should be taken into account throughout their imprisonment.
Cleo’s situation in prison is terrible: she is in permanent solitary confinement and is constantly deprived of her basic human rights. Urgent steps must be taken to improve her multiple discriminatory and precarious conditions in the men’s prison in Neuruppin.
Cleo is in acute danger – physically and mentally! […]
Cleo stands for many whose lives are threatened by racism, transphobia and state violence. Your donation shows: ‘We see you. We protect each other. We will not give up.’

“In a time of rapidly escalating global attacks on trans people, coordinated efforts to erase our legal status and right to self-determination, media smear campaigns, painting us as sexual predators and psychiatric problem-cases who should be forced into accepting our assigned gender, it is no surprise that the state is enacting misogynistic and racist criteria of who can or cannot be a woman.
And in a time in which Germany is escalating its repression of the right to free speech and the right to political dissent, the stripping of an asylum-seeking Black trans woman of her agency and right to self-determination sends a clear message: those who do not fit the mold are not welcome in this country.
This case that should enrage and awaken us all to action—it is the responsibility of all of us to stand in solidarity with Cleo against the horrific state-sanctioned violence. She deserves better, as do we all.”

Key terms

Misogynoir: The term misogynoir (a portmanteau of misogyny and noir) refers to the specific hatred, aversion, suspicion and prejudice towards Black women. Transmisogynoir describes the oppression of Black trans women. Source: Biehl, Brigitte (2023)

Consuelo, a Black trans man from Spain, has been unlawfully detained by German authorities since April 3rd. After being stopped while driving without cause by police in Berlin, he was arrested, degraded, misgendered, accused of faking his ID and denied contact with the outside world. This treatment reflects a pattern of systemic violence against trans people, who are criminalised, disbelieved and subjected to abuse by law enforcement. He now faces fabricated charges and is being held in the women‘s unit at Pankow jail until his trial in 3 months. With no clear timeline for his release, we’re coming together to raise funds to support his survival now and his transition to stability after this unjust detention.

This is not justice—its targeted state violence. Consuelo moved to Berlin in 2019 to support his family and build a stable life, despite facing systemic racism and underpaid labor.

The unlawful detention of Consuelo is the predictable violence of a system built on anti-Blackness, colonial dispossession, and transphobic dread. The prison industrial complex does not “rehabilitate”; it disappears the marginalized, cages the poor, and enforces the gendered/racial order through brutal force.

We refuse this colonial tragedy and fight against a regime that pathologizes resistance and criminalizes survival. Prison is not a place of “justice”, it is a site of racial capitalism’s bloodiest transactions, where Black, trans, and migrant lives are traded for profit and political spectacle. We reject the myth of “criminality”.

Cleo and Consuelo are not the only trans people to have experienced violence at the hands of the justice system, nor will they be the last. Every June, we remember that we had to fight for our rights: the cornerstone of this fight was the struggle against the everyday criminalisation of poor, racialised trans people, sex workers and queers, who were arrested, beaten and harassed simply for existing. They fought back, and the riot that ensued is now known as Christopher Street Day. 

It was not until 17 May 1990 that homosexuality ceased to be classified as a mental illness in Germany: we also celebrate this every year on IDAHOBIT (transsexuality, the diagnosis that trans people still need in order to gain access to the healthcare system, however, remains in the list of mental illnesses. To this day, trans bodies are controlled and pathologised in this way). The fight for a self-determined life is therefore not yet over.