Op-ed: The Complicated Rights of Transgender Prisoners
BY Jillian Weiss
October 10 2012 4:00 AM ET
http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2012/10/10/op-ed-complicated-rights-transgender-prisonersI think most people abhor crime and criminals, and are not interested in providing the gold standard of anything for jailed criminals. At the same time, however, it is only a vocal few who long for us to adopt Kwan Li So No. 22 (widely considered the world's cruelest prison) as a model for our penal institutions.
On Sept. 4, a federal court ruled in favor of inmate Michelle Kosilek, who sued the state claiming that her constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment, alleging deliberate indifference by prison officials to her medical needs, had been violated.
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Kosilek, who is serving a life sentence for murdering her wife, is not a sympathetic character. The idea that she gets free medical care, while there are many Americans struggling to get even a minimum level of care, is abhorrent. But anger at transsexual prisoners for this state of affairs is misplaced. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, society takes from prisoners the means to provide for their own needs, and supplies: food, clothing and necessary medical care. As that court has said, "A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society." Legally, prison medical care is not required to be the best possible, but it does have to at least avoid intentionally ignoring a serious medical need. Here, the court found that prison officials embarked on a campaign of conspiracy, prevarication, and firing of doctors who indicated that Kosilek had a serious medical need. They bought hired gun doctors to back up their case, from facilities headed by people with religious and moral objections to any sex reassignment surgery for anyone.
