By Sessi Blanchard | July 15th, 2019
On July 7, 2018, Kendra Michelle Lovejoy did to herself what no one else would: surgery. Wielding a disposable razor, she made incisions into her testicles. She was rushed to the hospital where physicians performed reparative surgery.
Since 2015, Lovejoy has lived in the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) facility at Moose Lake, where she is confined indefinitely on a civil commitment order. (The program operates a second facility in St. Peter.) Civil commitment is a form of post-incarceration confinement for people with sex offense records who have been determined by a district court judge to have a “sexual psychopathic personality” or be a “sexually dangerous person” in need of psychiatric treatment.
While committed, Lovejoy has attempted gender-affirming self-surgery, as she calls it, eight separate times, she told The Appeal in a letter. After her latest attempt, Lovejoy told the staff that she intended to continue performing the surgery until she receives the medical care appropriate for someone who is experiencing gender dysphoria, like she is as a transgender woman.
Instead of providing her with the treatment considered medically necessary by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), an organization that promotes evidence-based transgender healthcare, two MSOP clinicians issued Lovejoy an individualized program plan aimed at “address[ing] client’s treatment-interfering behavior.” Although the plan advises Lovejoy to “work on the deeper issues behind the behaviors,” it makes no mention of gender dysphoria or any other issues related to Lovejoy’s transgender identity. Instead, the plan places her surgery attempts in the context of her “pattern of disruptive behaviors.”
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Read at The Appeal