Published March 25, 2026
On March 25, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellows Mary Rice Hasson and Eric Kniffin filed an amicus brief in Wagoner v. Alaska Dep’t of Corrections. This case was brought by a prisoner, Wagoner, who is serving a 60-year sentence for sexually abusing children, and who has also been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and borderline personality disorder. Wagoner argued that Alaska’s refusal to grant his request for a vaginoplasty—a sex-rejecting surgery that involves amputating a male’s testicles and penis—violated the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. The district court sided with Wagoner; Alaska then appealed to the Ninth Circuit.
EPPC’s brief, filed by Mary Rice Hasson and Eric Kniffin, noted that American courts have treated court-ordered castration as a “paradigmatic example of cruel and unusual punishment.” The brief argues that the district court erred by ruling the Eighth Amendment required Alaska to give Wagoner a vaginoplasty without accounting for ample legal authorities that hold the Eighth Amendment precludes courts from ordering prisoner castration. The brief also argues the district court erred by accepting dated and false premises about the necessity of sex-rejecting surgeries.
From EPPC’s brief:
Properly understood, the Eighth Amendment analysis in this case requires a threshold inquiry the district court missed. The court focused exclusively on whether denying Wagoner’s request for a vaginoplasty would be “cruel and unusual,” without first asking whether—and under what conditions—the Eighth Amendment permits a state to facilitate irreversible amputations of a prisoner’s sexual organs. That omission matters. The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause imposes independent, objective limits on what the State may do to a prisoner’s body, limits that do not disappear because an inmate requests the procedures or a clinician labels it “treatment.” ….
The district court compounded this analytical error by [holding] that vaginoplasty is “medically necessary” to treat an inmate’s “severe gender dysphoria” … [T]he asserted medical necessity of sex-rejecting genital surgery rests on a contested, weak, and methodologically fragile evidence base. … Alaska’s denial of Wagoner’s requested vaginoplasty is therefore not “cruel and unusual.” It reflects a constitutionally permissible effort to provide medically necessary care while respecting the Eighth Amendment’s longstanding safeguards against mutilating and coercive conditions of confinement.
Mary Rice Hasson, JD, is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where she co-founded and directs the Person and Identity Project, an initiative that promotes the truth of the human person and counters gender ideology.
