(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Last September, a federal judge ordered the Indiana Department of Correction to provide “gender‐affirming surgery” to self-purported Muslim transgender inmate Jonathan C. Richardson, who now goes by the name “Autumn Cordellionè” and is serving a 55-year sentence for killing Richardson’s infant stepdaughter.
However, no doctor in Indiana is willing to conduct such a surgery, parties to the lawsuit revealed in a status report Wednesday.
According to the status report, the Indiana DOC referred Richardson to IU Health’s Dr. Joshua Roth, but he declined to move forward with the procedure. Headline USA revealed last month that the Indiana DOC had been pressuring Dr. Roth to conduct the surgery, even though psychologist Dr. Kelsey Beers filed a report recommending against it.
This is just incredible: Indiana's prison system can't find a single doctor in the state willing to give a sex change to the baby-killing, self-purported trans Muslim inmate.
It also looks like doctors around the country are shuttering their sex-change practices.
Moreover, 15… https://t.co/bVu3YDNdOX pic.twitter.com/zMnA4nuPId— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) February 5, 2025
Dr. Roth was apparently the only possible option in Indiana. Wednesday’s joint status report said that the DOC had also reached out to two other surgeons who were known to provide sexual reassignment surgeries in the past—Dr. Michelle Jones Singer and Dr. Ashley Robey—but they said they no longer perform those types of surgeries.
Richardson’s attorney, Kenneth Falk, also provided DOC with a reference to Dr. Jonathan Witten, a surgeon who practices in Kentucky and Indiana—but Dr. Witten, too, said he no longer conducts sex changes.
“Despite DOC’s diligent efforts to refer the Plaintiff to Dr. Roth and identify another surgeon with the state, it has been unable to identify a surgeon in Indiana who is willing to perform a sex change surgery on a prisoner,” the status report said.
The Indiana DOC said it even contacted 21 other states that it has interstate compacts with, to see if they would be able to facilitate Richardson’s gender-reassignment surgery. Those states are Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Virginia, Wyoming.
According to the status report, 15 of the states declined to even consider the matter. The remaining six—Alabama, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oklahoma—said they would need to review material further before deciding.
The DOC opposes being forced to send Richardson out of the state for a sex change.
“The Court lacks jurisdiction to alter a preliminary injunction currently on appeal, and the Plaintiff has not cited any authority supporting a finding that the Eighth Amendment requires DOC to transfer a prisoner out of state for the purpose of a sex change,” the status report said.
It’s not clear whether Richardson’s sex change will still move forward now that Donald Trump is President, given Trump’s executive order to cease federally funded sex changes for prisoners.
And even though Richardson’s lawsuit is against a state institution that isn’t subject to Trump’s order, the Indiana DOC successfully motioned on Jan. 29 to have Richardson undergo a mental health evaluation. The DOC said in its motion that such an evaluation is necessary because Richardson’s gender dysphoria diagnosis is questionable, given his “history of lying to and manipulating doctors.”
District Judge Richard L Young granted the DOC’s motion on Tuesday.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
