When gender isn't relevant
Correction: Because of a reporting error, Eileen McNamara's column Sunday mischaracterized a ruling by US District Court Judge Mark Wolf in 2002. He did not order the Department of Correction to provide Michelle, nee Robert, Kosilek with psychotherapy. Rather, Wolf found that Kosilek had a serious medical need that was not being adequately treated. The Correction Department subsequently provided Kosilek with psychotherapy and female hormone injections.
The trial underway in federal court in Boston is not about the rights of transsexuals. It's about the manipulations of a murderer.
What US District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf must decide is not whether denying a sex change operation to Michelle, née Robert Kosilek, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. It is whether the copious tears Kosilek shed on the stand last week are any more authentic than the crocodile tears he has been crying since he killed his wife 16 years ago.
Cheryl Kosilek's murder is not the subject of these proceedings, but it is worth recalling the circumstances and the aftermath of her death before deciding whether her killer is really at risk for suicide if the court does not order the sex-change surgery he seeks.
His sobs should not be the deciding factor. Kosilek has remarkable control of his tear ducts.
``My best friend has been killed, and they think I did it," the sobbing spouse told reporters in May 1990, while police searched a Mansfield condo for evidence to link him to her slaying. He allegedly strangled her with the wire from a hanging planter, dumped her body in the back seat of her car, and abandoned the gray Hyundai in the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleborough. ``I didn't do it. Of course I didn't. . . . I didn't do anything to her. I couldn't do that to anyone."
He shaved his beard and fled the state a few hours later. When police pulled him over on charges of speeding and driving drunk in New Rochelle, N.Y., the weepy fugitive told an officer: ``I can't call my wife. I murdered my wife." Then he fought extradition.
Brought back to Massachusetts five months later, Kosilek challenged the state's request for a psychiatric evaluation at Bridgewater State Hospital because, he said, he had been dismissed two years earlier for turning in guards who were abusing inmates. He had been fired, but not for the self-aggrandizing reason he had asserted. Kosilek was canned from the state Department of Correction facility for not mentioning on his job application the small matter of having served three years in prison in Illinois for theft and attempted burglary.
When he wasn't lying, Kosilek was crying. He cried at opening statements of his 1993 murder trial when his lawyer acknowledged that he had killed his wife, but that he must have done so in self-defense after Cheryl Kosilek had thrown tea at him. He said a drug- and alcohol-induced blackout had robbed him of a more precise memory of the crime.
It took the jury about 3 1/2 hours to convict him of first-degree murder.
By the time of his trial, Robert had changed his name to Michelle, had grown his hair past his shoulders, and had begun to dress as a woman. He sued the Bristol County sheriff, Donald Nelson, saying Nelson had denied him access to female hormones and, when that failed, he launched a write-in campaign for sheriff from his cell, representing what he called the ``New Woman Party."
Suicidally depressed? Master manipulator?
No one is arguing that gender dysphoria is not a legitimate disorder, or that psychic distress does not accompany the conviction that one is a woman in a man's body. In 2002, Wolf acknowledged as much, ruling that Kosilek ``has a serious medical need which is not being properly treated," and ordering the state to provide regular psychotherapy. Kosilek has been receiving daily female hormone injections while incarcerated.
Now, this wife killer is back at the well, demanding surgery to complete his transition to anatomical womanhood. Cosmetic surgery on his nose and Adam's apple would be nice, too. The compassionate jurist has done as much as is reasonable to make a convicted killer comfortable in his own skin. This time, Wolf should just say ``no."
``Death is not the greatest loss of life," the tearful murderer told the court last Thursday. ``The greatest loss is dying a little bit inside every day."
Cheryl Kosilek never had that choice.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
