Tara Hudson’s book Ten Years: A Transexual Memoir is both a profoundly intimate personal narrative and a sharp indictment of the systems that failed her. Written with honesty and urgency, it recounts a decade of her life in which she endured not only the ordinary struggles of living openly as a transgender woman but also the extraordinary injustices of being placed in a male prison despite her identity. What emerges is a powerful chronicle of resilience and survival, but also a plea for compassion, justice, and lasting change.
Hudson begins by reflecting on her childhood and the early awareness that she was different from those around her. She describes the years of self-discovery that followed, including her work as a make-up artist, where she built a career while continuing her transition. Yet the memoir’s most searing sections revolve around her incarceration in 2015, when she was sentenced to prison and initially placed in HMP Bristol, an all-male facility. What should have been a short custodial sentence turned into a national controversy after more than 150,000 people signed a petition demanding that she be transferred to a women’s prison.
