Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has joined a coalition of 23 other state AGs in filing a brief arguing taxpayers should not have to pay for sex change operations for prison inmates.
The brief was filed January 28 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a case from Indiana.
“Louisiana taxpayers should never foot the bill for sex changes for inmates,” Murrill said. “This lunacy was defeated at the ballot box in November. I’m proud to join my fellow attorneys general in supporting Indiana’s law and fighting to put an end to this nonsense.”
In the brief, the attorneys general say states are responsible for the security and healthcare of prison inmates, and “they need the flexibility to do that, on a limited budget funded by taxpayers, with security concerns unique to prisons.”
In the Indiana case, a federal court blocked an Indiana law that prohibits the payment of any money or use of state resources to provide gender reassignment surgery for an inmate. The court also required the state “to take all reasonable actions to secure plaintiff gender-affirming surgery at the earliest opportunity.”
The AGs are asking the Court of Appeals to reverse that lower court ruling.
The attorneys general also argue that the lower court based its ruling on standards of care from the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), but those standards are unreliable. In fact, the brief argues that WPATH changed its recommendations based on political concerns.
In September, U.S. District Judge Richard Young granted the ACLU of Indiana a preliminary injunction in its case representing Autumn Cordellioné, a transgender woman in the custody of the Indiana Department of Correction. Cordellioné sued the state after the DOC’s denial of gender affirming surgery. The ACLU had argued in court that Indiana’s law banning gender-affirming surgery in prisons, passed in 2023, violates the Eighth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The court agreed Cordellioné and the ACLU established that gender-confirming surgery is a medically necessary treatment option for some individuals with gender dysphoria. Young issued an order that the DOC must provide Cordellioné with gender-affirming surgery at the earliest opportunity.
Cordellionè is currently serving a 55-year sentence at Branchville Correctional Facility, an all-male state prison, for strangling an 11-month-old.
The State of Indiana appealed Young’s ruling in October.
“Prisoners like the convicted baby murderer in this case don’t have a constitutional right to gender transition surgeries, much less to have taxpayers’ foot the bill,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a statement. “We will continue doing our duty to defend Indiana’s commonsense laws. …
“We were very clear that we disagreed with the judge's decision in this case, and now we are officially appealing.”
Joining Murrill in the brief, which was led by Alabama, are the attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit case numbers 24-2838 and 24-3240