On a sunny day in October 2013, Shaw sits at her kitchen table and recalls that night in 2009 — the fight, the arrest, the assault. Her attorney, Jeffrey Light, sits nearby. Light is modest and thoughtful, with stooped shoulders and closely cropped brown hair. Shaw lives in a cozy one-bedroom apartment with her two beloved, noisy Chihuahuas, Toy and Krossheoh. Decorated in brown and tan, the living room is still home to an 18-inch, gold-painted statue of Venus — the companion to the David statue that broke.

Shaw has dimpled cheeks, a wide smile, and a round beauty mark above her lip. As a teenager she attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts near Georgetown University and has always loved being onstage. For decades, she performed at drag balls and fashion shows in long, sequined dresses. “I’m very, very, very shy,” she says, “but that person that you see on stage is totally different.”

In 1989, when Shaw was 23 and had been living as Patti for several years, she joined a traveling show called the Railettes and performed in an adaptation of Cinderella called ’Rella starring drag and butch queens. Considered a legend by many in the D.C. LGBT community, Shaw says she has performed at the National Zoo in D.C. and for former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams. She has appeared onstage as Natalie Cole and Jill Scott, and has a particular fondness for Phyllis Hyman because they have the same initials, shared a costume designer, and met once backstage in Chicago. Back in the day, “we all wanted to be like [Patti],” prominent D.C. trans activist Ruby Corado tells me.

Shaw thumbs through an album with pinup photos of herself — some in a sheer purple dress and others in floor-length, magenta-and-white feathered capes. She is beaming in the pictures.

Shaw got married in 1996 but after her operation three years later, things with her husband, in her words, “got sour" — she thinks that she was no longer appealing to him. In 2003, she was arrested during a fight with him and an officer searched her, put her in a cell with men, and allegedly “exposed my vagina to the inmates that was locked up with me.” She contacted the media afterward but her husband told her not to sue — she thinks that he didn’t want his co-workers and parents to know that his wife was transgender.

When their divorce was finalized in 2009, they had debts: more than a dozen credit cards, a truck, and a house in her name. She declared bankruptcy, set about rebuilding her life, but an incident in June of that year impeded that progress. She had suspected a friend of stealing her purse and called the police. She eventually found it, and says she was later robbed by two men outside her house. The officer came by, took her account, ran her name, and, according to her, later called her and said that he was issuing a warrant for her arrest because he realized her name was actually Melvin. She was arrested for filing a false police report.

Shaw is nearly yelling as she tells me about the argument with that arresting officer. “You telling me, based on my gender — because you ran my name — you don’t believe my story?” In police custody, Shaw says a male detainee touched her buttocks in front of an MPD officer, and a marshal later rubbed her breasts, butt, and between her legs for five minutes during a search. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” the marshal allegedly said, and joked that her breasts “must be implants, because hormones don’t make breasts stand up so perky.” According to Shaw, later, in the Marshals’ bullpen, male detainees allegedly groped her and she was forced to urinate in a cup in front of men.

Shaw says that as a child, while others wanted to grow up and be ballerinas or firefighters, “my dream was just to be a girl and to be happy.” Shaw had changed her ID, had surgery, and had been in a 13-year marriage, but now her husband was gone and the police and marshals were still locking her up with men. “Since I'm not with him, I'm not gonna be stupid," she says. "I need to just go ahead and be a voice.” Fighting back against the PDID system and the abusive searches in court was a way to keep pursuing that childhood dream and make sure “other transgender [people] won’t have to experience what I experienced.”

She filed her first lawsuit in 2011, but a judge dismissed it. An older cousin who works as a transgender liaison with D.C.’s Department of Corrections suggested Shaw hire Jeffrey Light to file another lawsuit. Light had gained trust and respect in the transgender community when he helped organize on behalf of an anti-discrimination ordinance in 2005.

Light filed suit in April 2012, and in June, Shaw and a friend were arrested for possession of PCP. Shaw had her little dogs with her in the car. Again, while she was in MPD custody, Shaw says male officers invasively searched her and male detainees masturbated in front of her. One threw “some kind of thick liquid” at Shaw and it landed in her cell. The charge was later dropped. Light amended the complaint that fall, adding the allegations related to the June arrest.

While sitcom reruns play on the TV behind her, Shaw tells us she has never been placed in protective custody or somewhere out of sight and sound of the other detainees. “They put me with the reptiles, with the snakes and lions, so they be hungry to get me. All night, all I hear is ‘psss, psss,’ and I’m seeing penises and cum shootin’ out,” she says. She begins to cry again and looks down at her hands. “I’m cried out.”

From Shaw’s couch, Light explains that lawsuits like this are rare because “it's hard for people to come forward and expose themselves to the publicity, being deposed, and the potential retaliation from the police.”

In the 18 months I’ve talked and met with Patti Hammond Shaw, I’ve come to appreciate the extent of her anger toward these agencies. A simple question about an arrest — “how many men were in the nearby cell?” — will release a torrent of foul memories. She has been utterly committed to telling this story, but her manner changes from casual and friendly to irate and wounded the moment she’s asked to recount the specifics of this case.

Not all have always sympathized with her. Trans activist Ruby Corado says that when Shaw first started complaining about being locked up with men, “nobody wanted to help her. Nobody.” According to Corado, many in the transgender community “turned their backs” on Shaw after her surgery. “I think people always thought, 'She gets in trouble and she gets what she deserves.'” But even people who have gotten into trouble — and Shaw has surely gotten into trouble — deserve rights. Her willingness to provoke people, to demand attention, and to sometimes literally fight has made her a particularly tenacious opponent in her lawsuit against the MPD and the U.S. Marshals. The outcome of this lawsuit will very likely help many people who have criticized her in the past.

Her story is one of persistent fear and frustration. "Any time I’m doing the least little thing, [the MPD] want to accuse me of doing something wrong," Shaw says. "Why? Because they think that they know my gender. And they think all transgenders have to be sex workers, have to be stealing." (Despite a pervasive stereotype, only around 1 in 10 transgender women the National Coalition for Transgender Equality surveyed reported having done sex work.)

Shaw sips a bottle of water and wipes away tears running down her cheeks. “We all are not criminals. Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Light replies softly.

In the suit, Jeffrey Light argued that when male officers and marshals searched Shaw and locked her up with men, they violated her rights not just as a transgender woman — but as a woman. The court agreed. "Everybody was really surprised that this worked,” Light says. He's also careful to explain that Shaw is legally female because she lives as a woman and has changed the gender on her documentation, not because of her sex reassignment procedure. Many transgender women can't or choose not to have that surgery.

The suit alleged that the marshals and the MPD officers named conducted unconstitutional and invasive cross-gender searches, and acted with deliberate indifference — meaning they knew that locking Shaw up with men would violate her right to safety. It also alleged that Musgrove’s supervisor, Benjamin Kates, and Merrender Quicksey, an MPD lieutenant who is the central cellblock manager, failed to properly train, supervise, and discipline officers.

Numerous motions to dismiss were filed by various defendants. When asked to discuss Shaw’s suit this June, the MPD declined to comment on “active litigation" but said of the PDID system, “We are aware of this issue and we are looking into a way to capture the individual’s current name and gender.” The U.S. Marshals have failed to respond to questions about their policies regarding transgender people and the lawsuit by our deadline.

The irony beneath all this is that as cities go, D.C. actually had some of the most progressive policies already on the books. But, as Light put it in 2012, “In D.C., you will find the widest gulf between what is supposed to happen and what has happened."