In this issue of LGBT Weekly, Stampp Corbin makes the moral and right case for gender affirmation surgery for a transgender prisoner in the California State Penal System. “Judge Jon S. Tigar said Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, 51,” publisher Stampp Corbin wrote, “should be entitled to gender reassignment surgery because it was the ‘only adequate’ treatment for her condition. Let the silly politicization of the issue begin.”
From the medical perspective, this is an issue that is without shades of gray. When a person is convicted of a crime that person often becomes a prisoner of the government, and the government deprives that person of liberty through incarceration. In the process it also deprives that person of the ability to care for their own medical needs. That means the government takes on the extraordinary obligation of that inmate’s health care. Those obligations include a duty not to inflict cruel and unusual punishment, and denial of necessary medical care qualifies as inflicting cruel and unusual punishment.
And what we know in the transgender community, and many in the broader LGBT community are becoming aware of, is that transgender health care is no more expensive, no more complicated and no less necessary than health care that’s provided to others every day. That includes diabetes, heart surgery, cancer and dialysis.
But sometimes, it’s a hard sounding case when we talk inmates. Michelle Kosilek is probably best known for being a convicted murderer who’s been trying for two decades to have the state of Massachusetts pay for gender affirmation surgery. It’s a little difficult to feel sympathy for someone who murdered her wife and has been sentenced to life without parole, and perhaps that lack of sympathy played into why the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals voted 3-2 (en blanc) to deny her request for surgery.
And here’s another case. Aug. 19, 2014, Laverne Cox released a video with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) in support of transgender prisoner Synthia China Blast. “Lack of adequate medical care, abusive and evasive treatment by law enforcement officials and denial of basic human rights …” Blast wrote in a line in a letter that Cox read for the video.
You can’t watch that video online on the SRLP’s Web site now as Cox asked for the video to be taken down. Blast, it turns out, was convicted of raping and killing 13-year old Ebony Williams in 1993.
“Laverne Cox partnered with us on our End Solitary campaign by reading a letter from SRLP member Synthia China Blast in a video,” the SRLP wrote in a statement, “but has since requested that we remove the video from our site because of her concerns about Synthia’s convictions. We understand her decision is based on concerns about violence against children … [we] reaffirm our support for Synthia China Blast, and our position on prison abolition and transformative justice.”
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is seeking a stay on court-ordered gender affirmation surgery for Michelle-Lael Norsworthy. She cites the Kosilek case in seeking to deny her what trans people know is medically necessary treatment. “Here, medical and mental-health professionals obviously disagree on Norsworthy’s present course of treatment,” it states in the attorney general’s brief. “Indeed, other courts have found treatment similar to that provided to Norsworthy to be constitutionally adequate. While practitioners agree that non-surgical options such as hormone therapy and counseling are appropriate, they strongly disagree whether sex-reassignment surgery should be performed now, if at all, to alleviate her mental distress.”
Is Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s case against cruel and unusual punishment less valid because it’s transgender specific surgery she’s requesting? Do we look at trans specific health care treatments as not being on par with other medically necessary treatments?
That is the point. We all know – we all know – trans people are still treated as lesser human beings, even by those who would drink cocktails at a party at a LGBT organization’s fundraiser with us and tell us we’re somebody’s who deserve full equality. Well, the real, unspoken message is almost full equality.
How the lowliest of a class of people is treated teaches us what kind of citizens that class of people are; Kamala Harris is teaching us what kind of citizens trans people are in how she’s arguing this case of medical treatment for Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, and it’s not first class.
