Transgender inmate freed before surgery
A transgender inmate was paroled Wednesday after 28 years in state prison, a day before a federal court was scheduled to hear the state’s appeal of a judge’s groundbreaking order allowing the inmate to undergo sex-reassignment surgery.
The release of Michelle-Lael Norsworthy to a halfway house in San Francisco means she will not have the operation in prison, though she can still have the procedure covered under Medi-Cal.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco canceled Thursday’s hearing in Norsworthy’s case but did not dismiss her lawsuit, as state prison officials had requested, and said it would consider written arguments from both sides.
Besides the male-tofemale surgery, the lawsuit challenged the prison system’s refusal to allow Norsworthy to change her legal name from Jeffrey, her birth name. She still needs prison officials’ approval for a name change while on parole.
“This isn’t over for me,” Norsworthy said in a statement released by her lawyers at the Transgender Law Center. “My case is ongoing and I’m going to keep on fighting for myself and for all the women still inside.”
On Friday, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reached a settlement with another inmate, Shiloh Quine, allowing her to undergo sex-reassignment surgery — the first such operation approved by a state prison system in U.S. history — and agreeing to review and revise its policies for medical care of transgender prisoners. Officials say 385 transgender prisoners in California are undergoing hormone therapy — 363 male-to-female and 22 female-to-male.
Norsworthy, 51, was sentenced to 17 years to life in prison in 1986 for second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a friend after an argument at a bar in Fullerton (Orange County). After repeatedly denying release since 1998, the state parole board voted to free her in May, saying she no longer posed a danger, and Gov. Jerry Brown let the decision stand Friday.
Norsworthy began hormone therapy in 2000, with prison doctors’ approval. Held in a men’s prison, she was gang-raped by nine inmates in 2009 and contracted hepatitis C, which forced her to reduce her hormone intake.
Her state-assigned doctors said she was suffering severe mental problems and recommended sex-reassignment surgery, but the prison system in 2013 appointed a new group of evaluators, who found no medical need for the operation.
U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of San Francisco ordered the surgery in April. He said prison officials had been “deliberately indifferent” to Norsworthy’s medical needs and were using their new medical team to justify a blanket policy of refusing to perform such operations.
The department has denied it ever had such a policy and cited the case of Quine, whose surgery was initially rejected by prison officials but was recommended in June by a state-appointed medical expert.