A biologically male Minnesota transgender inmate is being moved to a women’s prison and will receive taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery, as well as $495,999 to settle a discrimination lawsuit against Minnesota’s Department of Corrections.
Federal judges have disagreed with each other about whether transgender inmates are entitled to taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery under the 8th Amendment. But this lawsuit was filed in Minnesota state court, which is more progressive, and in Ramsey County, one of Minnesota’s two most progressive counties.
Under the settlement, 57-year-old Christina Lusk will be transferred to the women’s prison in Shakopee next week. As part of the settlement announced on May 31, the prison system agreed to provide Lusk with a vaginoplasty as well as strengthen its policies regarding transgender inmates.
Lusk, who was arrested in 2018 and is serving a sentence until 2024 for a felony drug offense, sued the Minnesota DOC last year in part because it deferred Lusk’s request for a vaginoplasty, or “bottom surgery.”
After beginning cross-sex hormones in 2009, Lusk changed names in 2018 and was discussing sex change surgery with doctors before being arrested. Lusk had undergone “top surgery” before going to jail, and was “on the verge of scheduling” a vaginoplasty, according to the lawsuit.
This is different than some other transgender inmates, who changed their gender identity only after being arrested, seemingly as a way of getting into a women’s prison rather than a men’s prison. Not surprisingly, there are male inmates would prefer to be in a women’s prison where they can have sex with women. Last year, two women at a New Jersey prison for women were impregnated by transgender inmates. A transgender inmate with a penis was recently transferred to a New Jersey prison for women despite being a sex offender who abused his own daughter.
Lusk filed a prison grievance after prison medical director James Amsterdam reviewed Lusk’s case and determined that Lusk should not be allowed to receive genital surgery while incarcerated, but “could pursue that after release,” according to Lusk’s court complaint.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Lusk’s behalf by the St. Paul-based advocacy group Gender Justice, alleged that Lusk was treated with hostility by inmates of the men’s prison. “Inmates would heckle her … call her ‘it,’ that sort of thing,” Gender Justice legal director Jess Braverman alleged. “And then there were staff who would say things to her, such as, ‘You know, you’re a man in a men’s prison. I’m not going to treat you like a woman. I’m not going to use your proper name and pronouns.'”
In January, the Minnesota DOC joined 10 other states and the District of Columbia in establishing a policy by which inmates can be transferred to facilities that match their stated gender identity.
Society often pays for transgender people’s sex change surgeries, which sometimes cost over $200,000, because Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) often requires insurers to cover sex changes and gender-reassignment surgery.
But sex-change surgeries are frequently a bad investment, because they often have life-threatening complications. “The truth about transgender surgery” is that “Just 16% of gender dysphoria patients go through with the operation, but up to half suffer life-threatening complications,” reports the London Daily Mail. “Up to half of trans men and women suffer post-op issues or pain so severe they need medical attention or additional surgery months later….Patients are often left with infections, pain and difficulty using the toilet or having sex post-surgery….the Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario, Canada, earlier this year found that more than half of trans women who had ‘bottom’ surgery were in so much pain years later they needed medical attention.”
Even transgender people who demand to receive sex-change surgery admit that the results are not great. A transgender activist conceded that in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed:
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to.
She still wants the sex change, but doctors don’t have magical powers, so “sex change” surgery can’t fully give her the body she wants. Hence, Chu’s admission that she won’t be happy, even after her sex change, due to the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery.
The suicide rate of transgender people actually rises after they get sex changes, according to the Heritage Foundation.
The fact that so many transgender people never get a surgical sex change suggests that such procedures are not a great investment, and that taxpayers and insurers should not be forced to pay for them.
