At long last, some good news: U.S. District Judge Charles N. Clevert Jr. declared a law banning hormones from transgender inmates unconstitutional. The law was passed in response to an inmate who sued when denied genital surgery:
State law makers passed the Sex Change Prevention Act in 2005 in reaction to the case of a Wisconsin inmate who had been receiving the hormones for years, but sued when the Department of Corrections would not pay for sex-change surgery. Similar challenges were mounted in other states.
What’s interesting to me is that there is no mention of why an inmate might want genital surgery aside from being transgender: inmates are housed based on their genitals. That is, if a transgender woman has been living for 10 years in the female gender, but has not had genital surgery, she can be housed with male inmates.
Amazing how they never mention that in the light of “cruel and unusual.”
I’m not “for” taxpayers paying for surgeries for inmates, either, to be honest, but I am if the law is too dumb to understand and recognize an individual’s right to self-determine his/her gender. The same people who are concerned about taxpayers paying for these surgeries should get behind lightening the requirements to legally change gender identity on ID cards (but they won’t, since their objection is usually not based at all on making the lives of transgender people humane).