The court case involving Rhiannon O’Donnabhain, the 63 year old transgendered female who is suing the Internal Revenue Service to be allowed to deduct the cost of her sex change operation, just got a little more interesting – as if that were possible!
The IRS and lawyers for O’Donnabhain sides rested their cases last week, but not before controversy arose over an expert witness for the government. Bennett Klein, one of O’Donnabhain’s lawyers, claimed that forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, a witness for the IRS, was not trustworthy because of his false testimony in another high profile case. You may remember Dr. Dietz’ name… He is the doctor who testified in the 2002 Andrea Yates trial that an episode of the television series Law & Order depicted a woman who was acquitted by reason of insanity after drowning her children. Yates was convicted in that trial. However, no such episode of Law & Order existed, and later, Yates’ conviction was overturned.
Dietz acknowledged at trial that he had made a mistake with respect to his prior testimony. However, he insisted that with respect to this trial, “gender identity disorder” is not a disease.
The judge will ultimately decide whether the disorder is a disease. What do you think?
It seems like something out of “Ally McBeal” (yes, I’m dating myself here) but this Boston legal battle is the real deal. In US Tax Court in Boston, 63 year old Rhiannon O’Donnabhain, pictured above, is challenging a decision not to allow the $25,000 cost of her 2001 sex-change and breast augmentation surgeries as a tax deduction. According to the Internal Revenue Service, both surgeries were elective and cosmetic, and therefore not deductible as medical expenses.
O’Donnabhain argued that the procedures were medically necessary and not for cosmetic reasons. She claims, “If I didn’t have the surgery, I would have been on drugs or an alcoholic, or I would kill myself. There was no other way.” She claims that her prior existence as a father, husband and male had left her incomplete and that the surgery was the only way to make her whole. She had been diagnosed with a gender identity disorder in 1996 and had the surgery in 2001 as a corrective procedure, which she believes is fully deductible.
However, the IRS disagreed. This is not the IRS’ first involvement with this issue, though the Tax Court has never ruled on the matter. In 2005, the IRS similarly denied a deduction for a woman’s transgender surgery, citing authority that cosmetic surgery or similar procedures are deductible only when they are needed to “improve a congenital abnormality, an accident or trauma, or a disfiguring disease.”
Advocates for the transgendered hope for a favorable outcome which will force the IRS to treat sex-change as medically necessary and deductible.
And people think that tax law is boring…
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