(Reuters) – A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Massachusetts officials to pay for a convicted murderer’s sex change operation, ruling that the state had violated the inmate’s constitutional rights in denying the procedure.
In a 126-page order issued in Boston, U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf found in favor of Michelle Kosilek, who sued the Massachusetts Department of Correction 12 years ago to force it to provide him the surgery while imprisoned. Kosilek, according to court records, has suffered from gender identity disorder since he was a small child. He married a counselor he met while in drug rehabilitation, but murdered her in 1990 after she caught him wearing her clothes.
He was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In a world gone mad…….
Didn’t California just ban this sort of therapy?
Spot on. It is schizophrenic society where PC decides whether “gender choice” is immutable or not.
Science should be clear: if your mental disorder causes you to want to mutilate yourself, solution must never be to help along with mutilation. Gender is assigned by DNA code. If you have Y chromosome you are male, immutable by any mental choice or operation (or genetic appearance).
And if you’ve got YYX chromosomes, or defective genes, (and we define defective of course, every fifteen years or so,) or anything else which signals aberrant behavior, we get to nail your ass.
You sound like a taliban.
DNA is not deterministic, it merely sets operational limits. (You’ll never look good in a long slinky diaphanous sheath dress because you’ll only ever grow to be a four feet tall hairy dwarf, of any gender. :-))
The problem with any case involving a department of government, is that government really can never lose. If I get sued and lose for wronging a person, the judgement comes out of my pocket. When government gets sued and loses for wronging a person, again, the judgement comes out of my pocket!
I was curious who this Judge Wolf was. I guess I expected him to have been appointed by Carter or Clinton, the usual sources for wacko lefty federal judges, but he was appointed by Reagan.
I guess the problem isn’t Democrats or Republicans, its lawyers (and judges).
To get confirmed, a federal judge for a court in Massachusetts would have to be approved by both Senators from his home state.
First you put the lotion on?
That is a slippery slope.
I am a democrat and I say this is BS, murderers get nothing.
So does he say in the men’s prison or does he get transferred to the women’s prison? The last thing I would want to be is the only woman in a man’s prison. It’s genius if you get moved to a woman’s prison. There is so much more to the story I want to know.
Austin my boy. Let me esplain ’bout sex change surgery….
Judge is a Reagan appointee.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and the thing will dye on the operating table.
You want him to change colors too?
America is a wonderful country.
Where else can a strong, tall, strapping black male grow up to be a little white girl? (That you, Chris Rock for that Michael Jackson joke.)
Touche.
Wolf did not explicitly set a timetable for Kosilek’s surgery, saying it was up to the state to determine who should perform the operation and in which facility.
Surgery to be performed by his murdered wife’s family in a Home Depot parking lot using an assortment of weed wackers.
Willie Horton turned the 1988 election. Obama should pin this against Romney and the Reagan judge.
So what if Reagan approved him? I frankly don’t care if Jesus himself approved him, and then attached a halo to his head, decreeing “thou can do no wrong verdict”
Its a bad decision, and this is a bad judge.
More proof that we need loser pays laws in this country.
Apparently the moral of the story is, if you want something and cannot pay for it go murder someone, sue the state, and have the state pay for what you want.
I think that is mostly correct with the emPHAsis in the wrong place. If the counseling/sex change services had been available thru our healthcare system, the crime most likely would have been avoided. Its a crap shoot though. Just another cost of our bloated inefficient for profit health care system.
I posted somewhere that Mass could do as it wishes, but this turns out to be a Federal civil rights case probably egged on by the liberal in prison social service department. As usual– a mix.
I’m guessing here that there are hundreds if not thousands of trapped wrongly gendered persons currently in prison. You know prison: America’s answer to mental health services.
We could do so much better on just about every issue there is ====== at half the cost. Values voters are against it though so we squander our potential as an even better society.
We need a special tax to allow these poor souls a chance to be who they are.
What about the people in prison who are trapped in the body of the wrong species? I bet there are plenty of snakes, rats, dogs, cats birds and insects locked up in the system. Not to mention the wolves and sheep.
I think that judge has done the right thing. Why does everyone go crazy over this? If you lock someone up, you become responsable for their well being also. Looking at the responses (“In a world gone mad…….” is one of them) many obviously think it is ok to treat them as animals right away also then. That tells more about your own state of mind then about that judge ruling in favour of this guy. These weird reactions may also explain why many americans have no problems with torture in Guantanamo Bay.