9.5.2025

Dear Aunt A.,

I dropped your boy off at his first day of work for Transform Dane on the outside today. He’s doing work release for the business we started. What began with your phone call to me, asking me to foster Eli’s dogs for a short period, has evolved into one of the closest friendships of my life, and a new purpose for both Eli and me (and two new dogs in my house of course).

We started with Eli’s idea for a blog, his desperate need to tell his story after he went through an experience that was previously unimaginable to him, and all too predictable to me. Since then, we’ve transformed into a direct action organization, making meaningful change in the world. After ten months of meetings over a jail recorded line and carefully-handwritten letters in lieu of emails, Eli walked into his new remote office as the co-founder of a nonprofit dedicated to helping people through periods of incarceration.

Driving away, I was so proud of him. I’m proud of all the self-advocating he’s done to get to this point, all the reaching out for help when it was hard, all the spreading good and kindness where others spread darkness and greed. And I wondered about what it was like for you, dropping him off at his first day of school. Was it full of this much pride? this much fear?

You know I don’t have kids, so I have no idea what it’s like dropping your first child off at their first day of school. But I do know how scared I felt today at the same time as I was beaming with joy, grinning from ear to ear. Scared because of all the things he’s vulnerable to now that he wasn’t vulnerable to before, scared of the influences he’ll have and the choices he’ll face. Scared because I have to trust and believe that he’ll make the right decisions on the outside now.

I wished I could have reached out to you and asked what it was like that day, dropping him off for the first time. What a lifetime ago that must feel like. What a different person he was then, yet I’m sure so much the same, headstrong and defiant. We are cut from the same cloth, but as you know, Eli doesn’t back down. That has led to difficulties over the past year at times, but more than anything, it has gotten us where we are now.

But let me back up. To how this began, how it evolved, how it took shape.

“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; the opposite of addiction is connection.”
– Johann Hari, Ted Talk

You know this line. Eli has referenced it in Facebook posts for years. He quotes it in blog posts, links it in every signature line, and even referred to it in court during his statement at sentencing.

Eli has experienced a lot of privilege in his life. He enjoyed privilege as a white, smart, athletic, pretty, upper-middle-class police officer. That privilege gave him a vantage point from which to look down on people in Dane County Jail as failures, derelicts, burdens.

But when he needed it the most, those failures, derelicts, and burdens were the people who were there for him. They were the ones who sang, “I’m Coming Out” and “A Whole New World” down the hallways with him until the deputies began complaining. They were the ones attempting to teach him to dance, only to tell him, laughing, that his efforts resembled bowling more than dancing.

What he didn’t know before this experience, what he has discovered, is the privilege that matters most in life – the privilege of connection. He quoted the line above for years, and didn’t really feel the true meaning of it until he was in a jail uniform, locked in the City County Building of Dane County Jail.

Eli noticed that the connections he had to the three members of his “Badass Team of Weirdos” on the outside: the fact that he had someone to call and shoot the shit with a couple times a day, and the packets of coloring pages and case law that arrived in the mail, those were what mattered the most. And he saw that not everyone sitting in Dane County Jail had those connections. That was how our direct mail program was born.

We’d already been doing advocacy work. We started by telling Eli’s story on the blog. We also began gathering stories from other trans folks who have experienced incarceration, and offering resources to them and their loved ones. With direct mail came lists of requests for coloring pages, puzzles, lyrics, poems, and quotes, first from Dane County Jail, then to other counties and into prisons across Wisconsin as inmates moved and word about our organization traveled.

After the website was built and the formal business entities established, we got to work communicating our message to our elected officials in Dane County and the Capitol. We told them what happened to Eli, and they were horrified. They agreed that this could not happen to another individual, and our network of connections grew wider. We’ve been offered extraordinary opportunities to work with these individuals to make real, meaningful change in black and white, on paper.

Next came public education. Policies are only words on paper. We needed to help people see what really happens in the carceral system, how people are treated, where the real priorities of jail staff lie. Thousands of people drive by Dane County Jail every day. It is situated right between the Capitol and Lake Monona. But how many of those people actually think about the individuals living in that jail? How many times have you driven past that jail and not noticed it was there? That was the uphill battle we were facing.

So we started tabling at events. We brought toy frogs, we brought stickers, we brought joy; and we brought one of the most depressing messages anyone who stopped to see us would hear that day. But it needed to be heard. People thanked us, they hugged us, they cried with us. We met the community on the outside, and we connected them with the people on the inside. Through artwork, stories, and coloring pages, we took Eli’s story and his passion to help others, and turned it into a movement. Eli has finally become that change he’s always wanted to see in the world.

And that snowball hasn’t stopped rolling downhill. Each time we go into the community, each time we step into the post office with a stack of care packages, we create new connections, the word spreads a little further, and this movement grows bigger.

Every step of the way, Eli has remained our steadfast leader, pushing for innovation and bigger impact. In many ways, this has been the best year of his life. He has done extraordinary things before. He has achieved accolades that most people never dream of. But when I hear him talk with pride about all we have accomplished since he was incarcerated, I know this is the year that has mattered.

And today was a finish line in a way, a hard-won battle for rights and rehabilitation, but it was also just the start of something even greater. Eli has been painted as a villain in this narrative. But he is proving the only weapons he needs are his words and that strength and stubbornness we all love (and occasionally loathe) him for.

We send off each of our Transform Dane care packages with the message, “You are not forgotten” at the bottom. You are not forgotten either, Aunt A. I haven’t forgotten you, Eli hasn’t forgotten you. He still talks fondly of you often. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten him either.

~B