A transgender inmate wants to reject an agreement that would make her the first in Wisconsin given state-issued women's underwear in a male prison and instead continue her lawsuit seeking a taxpayer-funded sex change.I must have a defective copy of the Constitution. Where, exactly, does the Constitution require states to pay for what is clearly an elective surgery for someone who is a guest of the state for committing a felony? It can't be the equal protection clause: no one else is getting elective surgery in the Big House.
The settlement, obtained by The Associated Press under the open records law, would end years of litigation involving the inmate formerly known as Scott Konitzer, who filed a lawsuit in 2003 challenging Wisconsin's practice of not paying for inmates' sex changes. But Konitzer, an armed robber who now calls uses the name Donna Dawn, is trying to back out alleging coercion was behind the agreement.
It can't be substantive due process: he/she/whatever isn't being deprived of life, liberty, or property by being denied elective surgery.
Clayton, you must be traveling through life with the the same Constitution of the United States as I have.
ReplyDeleteI like to think of CIVIL LIBERTY as LEX MAKE A DEAL. To bad that Lex make a deal is not mentioned in the Constitution, only Lex Populi (Common Law).
If the Founding Fathers had wanted us to have CIVIL LIBERTIES then they would have given us an Imperial Emperor and written the 'Imperial Bull for the subject States of the Imperial Empire of America'.
Unrelated rant:
ReplyDeleteMan, that StarTribune website is badly designed.
By which I mean, trying to read the article (or post a comment about how bad the website was, ironically) is pausing indefinitely on either Twitter or Facebook integration, respectively.
Evidently the idea that people don't care nearly as much about Social Media Integration as being able to read the article on a news site has not occurred to them?
Or perhaps they live in a magical world where Facebook's CDN is never slow, and Twitter's API site never fails to load?
"Third party stuff loads after real content" has been a guiding light of website design for over a decade now. Do they just not test?
Do they wonder why they're losing visitors and relevance?
Also, the legal argument there is that he has "Gender Identity Disorder", and evidently someone has decided that that means he needs, medically, To Be A Woman.
ReplyDelete(As opposed to treating it as a psychiatric condition that needs a completely different sort of treatment, aimed at making him No Longer Want To Be A Woman.)
He's already getting state-paid hormone treatment to treat his "Disorder". I suppose the argument is that the surgery, rather than really elective, is the more efficient and effective treatment for his "Disorder".
So the suit appears to be for the most appropriate treatment of his medical condition, as diagnosed, rather than for elective surgery as such.
I am, as you might have noticed, dubious about this proposal.