Angry in the Great White North

a heat-seeking missile in the Conservative arsenal

In Edmonton, violence in a women's prison has exploded with the decision to house a male prisoner within its walls:

Synthia Kavanagh is in the midst of a 25 year sentence, the maximum under Canadian law, for the 1987 hammer slaying of a transsexual prostitute in Toronto.

Kavanagh allegedly trashed the Edmonton's women's prison, fought off guards and threatened the lives of others. She has been moved to the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario.

Didn't I say a man was at the root of the touuble?

Kavanagh won a landmark ruling in 2001 when the Federal Court of Canada ordered Corrections Canada to remove her from a men's prison, house her in a women's facility and pay for her sex reassignment surgery.

"If the medical opinion is that sex reassignment surgery is an essential service for a particular inmate, it follows that it should be paid for by Correctional Services Canada, as would any other essential medical service," wrote Madam Justice Carolyn Layden-Stevenson in her ruling.

The decision forced the government to pay for sex reassignment surgery for any transsexual behind bars who wanted it.

The problem is, of course, Sylvia Kavanagh is still a man.

Men who undergo sex reassignment are not re-sized to be women. They generally retain the muscle-mass and build of a man, though that is often traded for weight gain as a side effect of androgen deprivation, which means either being overweight or compensating with exercise. Worse than that, though, is the development of depression and migraines because of the estrogen therapy.

Oh yeah, facial hair, if already present, is only slightly affected by anti-androgens, requiring constant trimming or electrolysis.

So thanks to what has to be an incredibly bizarre decision from one of our jurists (and we know they are chosen based on their loyalty to the Liberal Party, and not on their wisdom, and yes, Judge Layden-Stevenson is a Liberal Party supporter), Corrections Canada was forced to put an overweight depressed muscle-bound bearded lady in a women's prison, and shockingly, violence ensued.

Now Kavanagh will probably have her sentence extended, and will have to spent it in a high security facility. She won't be alone though. She'll be allowed to take her sex toy with her, provided to her at taxpayers' expense for "therapeutic purposes".

Synthia Kavanagh was sentenced as Ricky Chaperon. As mentioned, he used a hammer to bludgeon a prostitute to death. That prostitute was his lover, a transvestite named Leo Black, aka Lisa Black.

Clearly Ricky had gender issues. So why was the operation considered essential? Did Ricky require plastic surgey because of some injury, or did he suffer from some kind of genital deformity?

Of course not. He was diagnosed with "gender dysphoria", which means he convinced a doctor that he believed he was the wrong sex. Like any psychological problem, there is nothing objective in the diagnosis:

• There must be evidence of a strong and persistent cross-gender identification.


• This cross-gender identification must not merely be a desire for any perceived cultural advantages of being the other sex.


• There must also be evidence of persistent discomfort about one's assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex.


• The individual must not have a concurrent physical intersex condition (e.g., androgen insensitivity syndrome or congenital adrenal hyperplasia).


• There must be evidence of clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

The fourth criteria is great -- it demands that there is no physical manifestation of gender confusion. But I like the last criteria in particular. Ricky was a convicted killer. I guess that counts as an impairment in an important area of social functioning.

That area of not whacking people.

But then I'm not a learned doctor or wise judge. And thankfully, I'm not a female inmate forced to share space with Ricky aka Synthia, or a guard required to keep order.