Inmate's gender dysphoria claim fails under qualified immunity

The Second Circuit has held that an inmate cannot win her lawsuit claiming the prison's failure to provide her with treatment for gender dysphoria and hormone therapy as well as a vaginoplasty violates the Constitution. The rationale is that the state of law was not clearly-established at the time of these alleged constitutional violations, entitling the defendants to qualified immunity.

The case is Clark v. Valletta, issued on October 6, nearly two years after oral argument. The reason for the delay is that this case is complex, and the majority opinion is met with a lengthy dissenting opinion in which the judge views the law differently and claims the majority has not properly applied the qualified immunity analysis.

Plaintiff is a transgender female who is, frankly, not the most sympathetic plaintiff, as she landed in jail after killing her ex-wife. The details of that crime are set forth in the majority ruling. More to the point, plaintiff wants treatment for her gender-related issues, but the jail said no. Hence, this lawsuit.

You cannot win a damages claim under the Constitution if your lawsuit does not assert the violation of a clearly-established right. That means you cannot just point to a constitutional provision and claim it's violation entitles you to a judgment in your favor. You have to identify prior case law from the Supreme Court or the Second Circuit that is sufficiently identical to yours, such that the defendants were on notice that they were violating your rights. The problem for plaintiff is that the issues raised in this case, relating to transgender medical treatment, are too recent and have not yet yielded the favorable court rulings that would repel a motion to dismiss based on qualified immunity.

While the district court allowed this case to proceed, rejecting the qualified immunity defense, the Court of Appeals (Sullivan, Park and Robinson [partial dissent]) says the lower court did not particularize that inquiry and instead "conduct[ed] its qualified immunity analysis at too high a level of generality." The district court defined the relevant right as "the right to be free from deliberate indifferent to serious medical needs." There is such a right, but that is too general a statement, the Second Circuit says. The correct formulation is whether that right extends to the particular circumstances of this case. It does not, at least not yet. That dooms the case. As "neither the Supreme Court nor this Court has recognized, much less clearly established, any constitutional right to specific gender-dysphoria treatments," qualified immunity attaches and the case is over.