Judge forces Indiana to pay for sex change operation for convicted baby killer

Young ordered the Department of Corrections to make the surgery available to Cordellioné as soon as possible. “Today marks a significant victory for transgender individuals in Indiana’s prisons,” ACLU of Indiana's Legal Director, Ken Falk, said in a statement, reported by the Daily Mail. “Denying evidence-based medical care to incarcerated people simply because they are transgender is unconstitutional. We are pleased that the Court agreed.”

The prisoner is in jail with a 55-year sentence for murdering an 11-month-old girl, Cordellioné’s own stepdaughter, in Sept. 2001. Cordellioné confessed to strangling the baby to death, whom Cordellioné referred to as “the little fuc*ing b*tch.” Cordellioné had been left to care for the 11-month-old, when the baby's mother was at work. The evening the mother went out, Cordellioné was visited by friends who said the now-prisoner was “acting strangely,” and refused to invite them in, per Reduxx. Cordellioné appeared to have a fresh, bleeding tattoo on an arm with the stepdaughter's name carved into it.

Cordellioné went to a neighbor’s house and requested that they call 911, claiming that the child was unresponsive. The 11-month-old girl died later at the hospital, with the cause of death ruled as manual strangulation. After being incarcerated, then-Richardson began identifying as transgender as well as taking synthetic estrogen.

The judge assessed that an operation was “medically necessary” and that denying the inmate the procedure was a violation of rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, which respectively ban “cruel and unusual punishment” and guarantee equal application of the law to all citizens.

“Ms. Cordellioné has shown that injunctive relief is necessary,” the judge wrote. “There is no dispute that gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition under the objective prong.” Young claimed that Cordellioné was at a “substantial risk of irreparable injury absent of injunctive relief” and could sustain self-harm and perhaps “another attempt to castrate herself or to die by suicide,” court documents read, according to the Mail.

“The evidence shows that she faces serious risks of severe bodily and psychological harm absent injunctive relief,” the judge wrote. Cordellioné suffers from depression and borderline personality disorder as well.

While noting that the convicted killer has been assessed by a medical team that concurs with the need for surgery, Young said it is therefore “medically necessary to alleviate the serious and debilitating symptoms of her gender dysphoria. It is appropriate for the court to order at this point that this surgery be provided to her at the earliest opportunity.”

In addition to identifying as transgender, Cordellioné also identifies as Muslim and has taken separate legal action for being denied a hijab. An entire list of demands Cordellioné has made called “Surgeries to Reach my Ideal Self” includes a vaginoplasty, breast implants, a brow lift, a brow reduction, a tummy tuck, gluteal implants (BBL), a uterus transplant, hair removal, and wigs.

In legal depositions, Cordellioné has claimed that talking to another male inmate named "Pearl" is what inspired the sex change: “I always knew I was a girl, didn’t know that term applied. Because until I talked to Pearl I didn’t even really know transgender was the name for it. I was hearing at the time that it was transsexualism and that didn’t seem to fit me because it was apparently people that like to wear girl clothes to have sex.” This is despite being briefly married to the mother of the baby that Cordellioné murdered.