BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Idaho officials are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that would force the state to pay for an inmate’s gender confirmation surgery.
Republican Gov. Brad Little announced Thursday that the state has formally asked the nation’s high court to take up the case.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals first ruled last August that the state must give 32-year-old inmate Adree Edmo gender confirmation surgery, agreeing with a federal judge in Idaho that denying the surgery amounted to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The full circuit court declined to reconsider the case in February, but several judges expressed their concern with the underlying ruling directing the state to pay for the transgender woman’s surgery.
Edmo has been housed in a men’s prison since she first began serving time on a charge of sexually abusing a child younger than 16 in 2012. She’s scheduled for release in July 2021.
She sued the state in 2017, contending that prison officials’ refusal to provide her with gender confirmation surgery causes her severe distress because she has gender dysphoria, a condition that occurs when the incongruity between a person’s assigned gender and their gender identity is so severe that it impairs their ability to function.
Neither side denies that Edmo has struggled with her condition since she has been in prison - Edmo’s attorney Lori Rifkin has said Edmo experienced such suffering that she twice tried to cut off her testicles in her prison cell.
But attorneys for the Idaho Department of Correction and private prison healthcare company Corizon say their physicians have determined that gender confirmation surgery would actually cause Edmo more harm than good because they believe it could exacerbate her other mental health conditions. The state’s attorneys also say that Edmo doesn’t qualify for the surgery because she hasn’t lived as a woman in a non-prison setting for at least a year.
Rifkin said she was dismayed by the state’s move.
“This is a straightforward case based on long-settled law that requires prisons to provide medically necessary care to incarcerated people,” she said in an email. “Prisons do not get to pick and choose which people to treat. There is no need for the Supreme Court to hear this case, and this is yet another delay tactic by Idaho, without regard for the harm it continues to cause Ms. Edmo every day that it denies her treatment.”
Little said the 9th Circuit Court’s ruling goes against more than four decades of Supreme Court precedent.
“We will vigorously litigate the Ninth Circuit’s unprecedented ruling at the Supreme Court because the taxpayers of Idaho should not have to pay for a procedure that is not medically necessary,” Little said in a prepared statement.
Idaho Department of Correction spokesman Jeff Ray said the department doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.
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