An Idaho judge's decision ordering prison officials to provide female hormone therapy to an inmate who castrated himself is far from a validation of taxpayer-funded treatment for gender identity disorder.

One Christian activist has urged readers of her blog to call U.S. District Judge Mikel H. Williams and tell him to reverse his decision “to support taxpayer-funded transgenderism” in the inmate rights case of Jenniffer Spencer. There is “no reason to have taxpayers pay for his treatments to become a woman,” Stacy Harp of Active Christian Media protested.

Spencer, who changed his name from Randall Gammett and believes he was “born a woman inside a male body,” sued corrections officials in June 2005 for failing to treat him for gender identity disorder. He castrated himself a few months later, explaining in a note that “I cut my genitals off do [sic] to the fact that I am a transgenderd [sic] individual and I could stand the sight of them no more.”

A prison psychologist had diagnosed Spencer only with “Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified,” saying he “appears to be more confused over sexual orientation than his actual gender identity.”

In granting Spencer's motion for a preliminary injunction, Williams ordered the Idaho State Correctional Institution in Orofino to provide “Plaintiff with appropriate female hormone therapy and psychotherapy to address Plaintiff's gender identity issues.”

But the judge ruled only on the “narrow issue” of whether officials had been deliberately indifferent to Spencer's “serious medical needs” since his self-castration –- not the broader issue of Eighth Amendment liability for failure to treat GID.

Officials have offered Spencer testosterone replacement but his experts testified that he requires female hormone therapy to treat "hypogonadism," a hormone deficiency caused by his castration. He has more than two years left to serve on a nine-year sentence for possession of stolen property and escape.

“Plaintiff has shown a fair chance of prevailing on the merits of a deliberate indifference claim based on the theory that prison doctors have offered only a medically unacceptable course of treatment post-castration, 'in conscious disregard of an excessive risk to [his] health,'” Williams concluded.

After the self-castration, a psychiatrist described Spencer as “psychologically trapped by his own cognitive distortions as he has removed his genitals.” But Williams said

there is little in the record to show that [defendants] have provided adequate psychotherapy or other counseling to address that issue. Rather, they seem to have consciously disregarded it.

In a case pending in Massachusetts, a judge is considering a convicted murderer's request for a sex-change operation at the taxpayer's expense. Last year, a Wisconsin judge enjoined prison officials from withdrawing hormone therapy prescribed to five inmates who have been diagnosed with GID.

“Circuit cases of two decades ago generally hold that GID inmates have no constitutional right to estrogen therapy,” Williams noted.

By Matthew Heller
8/7/07