Court rules state should pay for sex change of transgender prisoner | Al Jazeera America

This is another story I have been sitting on and pondering. My initial reaction was, hell no. Not due to any bias or bigotry, but due to the fact that she is in prison, for life. She killed her wife for god sake and in my mind when you enter prison, your rights to a "normal" life ends when you walk in the door. I'm not saying she does have basic rights to be treated humanly - food, shelter, protection from having the shit kicked out of her - but surgery of this sort, no.

But that thinking just wasn't sitting right with me and I couldn't put my finger on it till I read the following comment:

It upsets me that many people seem to think that mental health issues are not medical issues. If something can be fixed by medical care, then it sure seems to be a medical issue to me. Psychiatrists attend med school. They are authorized to issue prescriptions.

Certainly not every person with GID in prison gets a sex change. In this particular case, a team full of doctors signed a statement indicating that her reassignment surgery was necessary medical care. I choose to trust their appraisal over my own. Even by my own lights, the news indicates that she has tried to castrate herself and hang herself twice. She didn't threaten - she actually tried to, and had to be restrained. It seems that being unable to identify with her body poses a serious threat to her life. The state is obligated to protect its inmates. We do not let prisoners kill themselves; they are there to serve a sentence, not to take the easy way out.  [Emphasis mine]

Decades of research indicates that GID cannot be fixed by counseling, personal growth, etc. It is a real medical problem. People with GID have differing brain structures and their bodies respond differently to androgens compared to people without GID. It is a genetic, heritable condition.

A Massachusetts prisoner suffering from gender identity disorder should be provided a sex-change operation paid for by the state's prison system, according to a federal appeals court decision issued on Friday.

The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, in a ruling by a panel of three judges, said it agreed with a lower court ruling from 2012 that the Massachusetts Department of Corrections was obligated to provide the surgery as treatment for the inmate, who is serving a life sentence for murder.

"Having carefully considered the relevant law and the extensive factual record, we affirm the judgment of the district court," Judge Rogeriee Thompson wrote for the court.

The 63-year-old inmate, who legally changed her name to Michelle Kosilek from Robert Kosilek, sued the Department of Corrections more than a decade ago trying to force it to pay for gender reassignment surgery.

Kosilek was convicted in 1992 of murdering her wife, a counselor she had met while she was in drug rehabilitation, after she caught Kosilek wearing her clothes.

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**From my understanding, the state has actually spent more money fighting this case than what the surgery itself would cost.  And it is important to note that Kosilek had issues with GID prior to being incarcerated.

Court rules state should pay for sex change of transgender prisoner | Al Jazeera America