Medical or…something else?
Today, United States District Court Judge Richard Young granted the ACLU of Indiana a preliminary injunction in its case representing Autumn Cordellioné, a transgender woman currently in the custody of the Indiana Department of Correction (DOC). Ms. Cordellioné sued the state after the DOC’s denial of gender affirming surgery.
The ACLU of Indiana argued in court earlier this year that Indiana’s law banning gender-affirming surgery in prisons, passed in 2023, violates the Eighth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The court agreed that Ms. Cordellioné and the ACLU of Indiana established that gender-confirming surgery is a medically necessary treatment option for some individuals with gender dysphoria. The Judge issued an order that the DOC must provide Ms. Cordellioné with gender-affirming surgery at the earliest opportunity.
I wonder what they mean by “medically necessary.” How can “gender confirmation” be medically necessary? How can “gender dysphoria” be a medical issue?
They’re mashing together thoughts in the head and medical treatment for illness or injury. Drugs can change thoughts, to be sure, but is a delusion about the self really something that medically requires the mutilations that gender enthusiasts call “gender affirming”? Is it really something that requires prescription of off-label drugs? Is it really something that requires all this drastic medical intervention to help the patient pretend to be something the patient is not?
Clearly the ACLU thinks so, but I think the ACLU is delusional and reckless.
The US Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment imposes a duty on the states “to provide adequate medical care to incarcerated individuals.”
And is trying to help incarcerated individuals change sex really adequate medical care? What if instead it’s reckless endangerment?
It’s not even possible. No surgery or medication in the world can actually change someone’s sex. It’s doomed to failure. The goal of changing sex is not even on offer, no matter what measures are taken. It’s simply wasteful of resources without having any efficacy, and in fact it involves mutilation of otherwise healthy tissues and organs.
What if a woman prisoner needed a medically necessary abortion? Could she get one?
madders, that’s why I said “trying to help” instead of just “helping.”
There are so many layers of stupid destructive harm in all this.
Why did he not get ‘gender surgery’ himself before murdering his daughter. if he so strongly desires it?
Meanwhile, actual medical care for actual medical problems is very, very poor in American prisons. I know a guy who, unable to see a dentist in prison, resorted to extracting his own tooth. I’ve volunteered in a prison and I’m pen-pals with a number of incarcerated men — I can provide as many similar anecdotes as you wish.