A federal appeals court has overturned the ruling ordering Massachusetts to provide a taxpayer-funded sex change to transgender inmate Michelle Kosilek.

Kosilek is serving life in a men’s prison for strangling her wife, Cheryl Kosilek, to death soon after she began to transition from her male identity in 1990.

While a judge ruled in September 2012 that the state provide the sex change to treat Kosilek’s gender identity disorder, an appeals court recently heard arguments that taxpayers should not have to fund the inmate’s operation.

Kosilek, 65, was born Robert Kosilek. She has been receiving hormones and transition treatments during her sentence. Her lawyers argued in 2012 that the operation is medically necessary to her disorder and should be provided under the Eighth Amendment, which cites a prisoner’s right to adequate medical care and bans cruel and unusual punishment.


“After carefully considering the community standard of medical care, the adequacy of the provided treatment, and the valid security concerns articulated by the [Department of Corrections], we conclude that the district court erred and that the care provided to Kosilek by the DOC does not violate the Eighth Amendment,’’ Judge Juan R. Torruella wrote in the decision, via WBZ.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Ojetta Thompson said: “I am confident that I would not need to pen this dissent, over twenty years after Kosilek’s quest for constitutionally adequate medical care began, were she not seeking a treatment that many see as strange or immoral.’’

A three-judge panel in the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the 2012 decision in January 2014, but prison officials appealed the ruling. Arguments were heard again before a full panel of judges, which made today’s decision.