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  WINDY CITY TIMES

Trans woman petitions for early release from Elgin facility
by Gretchen Rachel Hammond
2015-06-10

This article shared 8036 times since Wed Jun 10, 2015
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The Elgin Mental Health Center is a sprawling complex of buildings set in the midst of farmland, forest preserves and the gently winding Fox River. Tucked away in a corner of the campus, the entrance to the William White Forensic Unit would be entirely inconspicuous were it not for the high, arching security fence surrounding the buildings.

It is within the confines of those buildings where 38-year-old Mia Kobi-Burks has made a home for most of the past two decades. They are located some 46 miles from a now long-abandoned and boarded-up house on the corner of 70th Street and South Damen Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. There, on a late September evening in 1993, Kobi-Burks shot her father, mother and sister multiple times "because one day I made a choice—the choice to explode, the choice to kill," she would later write to Windy City Times. "I have a spirit that will not allow me to give up but that spirit was forged in horror."

In an article covering Kobi-Burks' subsequent trial, the Chicago Tribune noted that prior to the murders she had been hospitalized and described by one physician as "raving."

Kobi-Burks was found not guilty by reason of insanity on July 7, 1995, and so started on two journeys—the first to Elgin and the second 16 years later, when she began the fight for transition-related health care in order to match her outer body to her inner self, and so put a lasting end to the torment that she asserts haunted her throughout her life.

"I'm learning, I'll be better soon," Kobi-Burks wrote in a blog dated August 2011 about "who I want to be, in the mirror, whom I want to see."

For that to happen, Kobi-Burks worked alongside civil-rights attorney Lowell E. Sachnoff. In 2013, Windy City Times reported on Sachnoff's successful argument that the Illinois Department of Public Health ( IDPH ) was legally obligated to provide Kobi-Burks with transition-related medical services. Furthermore he and Kobi-Burks had possibly set "a precedent for transgender people detained in jails, prisons and mental health centers throughout Illinois."

In early 2015 Kobi-Burks began her first set of surgical interventions and is currently searching for a specialist the IDPH will agree upon to perform her Gender Confirmation Surgery ( GCS ). Meanwhile she has received representation from Mark Heyrman, clinical law professor at the University of Chicago, in a petition for early release from Elgin.

Following two afternoons of hearings held in late spring of this year, Judge Lawrence Edward Flood of the State of Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County is expected to rule on the petition June 23.

Before the hearings began, Kobi-Burks invited Windy City Times to meet with her in the lunchroom of the William White Forensic Unit. Beneath her smile and carefully applied make-up, there was a tranquility in her voice and mannerisms that was consistent even as she described her early childhood and the days that led to the moment she remembered when "chaos folded in on itself."

The visit was a break in a disciplined routine that Kobi-Burks has established. A practicing and proud Muslim, she is up at 4 a.m. for morning prayers. She stays awake for medication three hours later, attends group sessions or spends time buried in a book at the library, taking courses toward a psychology degree while devouring and accumulating knowledge not only about her religion and the world outside of Elgin, but of herself.

Kobi-Burks recalled that even her earliest memories "felt like I was outside looking in. I always knew something wasn't quite right," she said. Growing up in the violent neighborhood surrounding her home at 70th and Damen, Kobi-Burks said she would often find solace in the fairy—tale world of The Little Mermaid. "I read the book," she said, "about this beautiful woman with nothing going on from the waist down."

Her father was a Chicago Police Department ( CPD ) officer and a strict Catholic whom Kobi-Burks asserted railed violently against any displays of femininity. "I tried to climb trees," she remembered. "But I just knew I wasn't a boy. When my dad would find me in [girl's] clothes, he would handcuff me to the radiator and beat me with an extension cord. I would beg my mom to intervene. I would scream out to her but she would just bury her face in her hands. She didn't want to get involved."

On the other hand, Kobi-Burks idolized her maternal grandmother, who worked at the local post office. She seemed to offer the only safety Kobi-Burks knew.

She said the Catholic institutions she attended, beginning with elementary school, served as the source of a consistently delivered anti-gay theology that terrified her into believing she was certain to end up in hell. And she also experienced brutal, relentless bullying.

"I was beaten up," she said. "They were always picking on me—name-calling, you know. I was assaulted when I was 13 by my schoolmates. It was both physical and sexual. I reported it to my dad but I felt like he was disgusted. I wanted to die. I mean, if the purpose of living is to be happy, I just thought anything had to beat this."

She attended Jones College Preparatory High School. There, she met her first girlfriend, whom she said she dated "just to prove my manhood. But I hated it. I would throw up after sex."

At the age of 15, Kobi-Burks was at a Burger King when she met a man she thought was in his mid-20s. She called him "Ice" and was immediately attracted both physically and mentally.

"He never saw me as a boy," she recalled. "He represented freedom and understanding. We became an item and I loved him."

However, Kobi-Burks alleged that her boyfriend had both drug and anger problems that escalated into abuse. "He would beat me," she said. "I represented gayness to him but I would stay with him because he validated my femininity. He would say to me, 'I'm the only person you got. I'm the only person who understands you.'"

She said she suffered numerous injuries, including fractured ribs and a broken nose, inflicted by her father and her boyfriend.

In 1993, Kobi-Burks' aunt died. She attended the Sept. 26 funeral with her boyfriend. "It was the first time my family saw us as a couple," she said. "When my father found out, he got upset and there was a confrontation. I felt chaos, anger, rage, sadness—every emotion all at one time."

According to the Chicago Tribune's report of the trial, Kobi-Burks began "ranting" at the funeral and relatives claimed she "acted bizarrely that day." The report also stated that the argument the following evening between Kobi-Burks and her father was over her use of a credit card in order to buy a coat and compact disc player.

Kobi-Burks told Windy City Times that the argument also concerned her boyfriend. She said, "I went up to my dad's room and he said, 'If I find out you've been with Ice, I'm going to beat your ass.' I said, 'There's not going to be any more of that'."

She said she then took her father's gun and shot him. After her mother and sister Tiffany realized what was happening, Kobi-Burks said, "Chaos folded in on itself. I fired the gun until it jammed. Then I put it to my head and it clicked. Nothing happened. I called the CPD. I couldn't believe I had done it."

At the trial almost two years later, it was revealed that Kobi-Burks was suffering from bipolar disorder and was abusing substances, including alcohol, ecstasy and cocaine.

Kobi-Burks said her first years at Elgin were difficult. "I was told that every coping mechanism I had was wrong," she recalled. "The doctors were [asking] me, 'Why don't you be a boy?' I would say, 'Because I'm not a boy!' They translated that into a behavioral problem. They medicated me heavily at first."

Respite was offered in visits from her grandmother and cousin.

Kobi-Burks said it took doctors at Elgin 10 years before they began to at least accept her as gay. By 2007, her behavior had impressed staff members enough that she was permitted to go off the grounds unaccompanied to work. She held a successful job at a telemarketing firm, even securing a promotion to assistant manager—until her privileges were revoked after she bought a car, an infraction of hospital rules.

In 2009, she escaped from Elgin by lifting a key from the nurses station, getting out of the building and somehow over the security fence. She told Windy City Times that she had "gone to help a friend."

The Daily Herald reported that police found Kobi-Burks "wandering" in a private yard in Bartlett, Illinois. At her request, they drove her to a local railway station. There, after they discovered she was an escapee, they took her into custody. She had been out for a matter of hours.

Kobi-Burks was transferred to the Chester Mental Health Center—a place she described as "hell inside of a box called hell. There was no hope there. They just tried to break your will."

Yet, for all the distress Kobi-Burks said she suffered there, at Chester she found someone who not only finally listened to her but in two simple words acknowledged everything she had tried to communicate for 33 years. He was a case worker she identified as Bill. One day he found her sobbing in her room.

"He said to me, 'You don't belong here or in Elgin,'" Kobi-Burks recalled. "Through my tears I repeated, 'I'm not a boy.' Then he replied, 'I know'."

Bill put Kobi-Burks in touch with Chicago's Howard Brown Health Center. She connected with celebrated trans activist Lois Bates and, by 2012, through the ACLU to Sachnoff ( of the law firm of Reed Smith, former senior partner at Sachnoff & Weaver, and general counsel for the Department of Mental Health ). His half-century of work on behalf of the mentally ill and for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, among others, earned him an Edwin A. Rothschild Award for Lifetime Achievement in Civil Rights.

Sachnoff told Windy City Times that his wife, Fay Clayton—herself a successful commercial litigator who had a fervent passion to help the transgender community—received a call about Kobi-Burks from the ACLU.

"My first impressions of Mia were that she is, first of all, someone with a good deal of mental acuity," he said. "She is very smart. She is someone who is passionate about being able to accomplish transition to her proper gender identity. She had studied up on it very carefully. She knew a lot about it and she was anxious to have it begin as a legal matter because the department was not responding to her requests."

Sachnoff added that when he met her, she struck him as "a bright, able person who'd had no violent or any kind of physical misbehavior in the 18 years she'd been with the Department of Human Services. The horrific event with her family that caused her initial hospitalization was the result of horrendous family abuse and since that event occurred she's been free of any violence or any kind of dangerous behavior."

Sachnoff helped Kobi-Burks return to Elgin and then set out to make history. "Mia is the first one—as a matter of law and because of the work that I and the people at the ACLU have done—to establish, as a legal right, that a patient who is in a Department of Human Services hospital and who has gender dysphoria requires treatment," he said. "In the seminal opinion in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the court said that someone who is in custody can no more be denied treatment for an ailment—whether it's appendicitis or a heart condition or gender dysphoria. Otherwise, it would be cruel and unusual punishment."

Although that victory was behind her, Kobi-Burks was to discover that even within the self-contained world of Elgin—where the action of every patient is subject to microscopic analysis—she would still face challenges all too familiar to the transgender community.

With her legal victory came the unwelcome attention of the radical feminist website Gender Identity Watch, alarmed at the prospect "that Burks will be housed with actual women upon completion of his treatment."

That group's opinions of transgender individuals were represented at Elgin, when, on April 8, 2014, a fellow patient began to verbally harass Kobi-Burks, making disparaging remarks about her gender identity. According to a nurse who witnessed the incident, even though the female patient was screaming at her and provoking a fight with phrases like "at least I know who I am," Kobi-Burks was quiet at first and ignored it. The attacks increased in ferocity until Kobi-Burks turned as if to move toward the patient, but Elgin staff ordered her to stop.

Despite the incident going no further, at the hearings for her petition for early release held one year later on April 21 and May 12, 2015, respectively, Cook County State's Attorney Martin Moore continuously raised the issue—alongside Kobi-Burks' brief escape in 2009 and the revocation of privileges due to her purchase of a car in 2007—as reason enough to counter Heyrman and his team's arguments that, if released, Kobi-Burks will not inflict harm on herself or another individual.

Her gender identity took on two disparate roles at the hearings. While Heyrman noted that the multiple stressors and abuses she received outside were a part of the aggravating circumstances that led to the events of September 1993, Moore seemed to be using it as all the more reason to keep her hospitalized.

While inconsistently misgendering Kobi-Burks, Moore indicated that her behavior since hospitalization bordered upon arrogance and that her infractions of the rules demonstrated the kind of impulsivity that increased her risk factor for violence in the future.

Heyrman contended that Kobi-Burks was in full remission of her bipolar disorder and that she had come to terms with her identity—thus, finding understanding and related contentment. According to Heyrman, the events of 22 years ago were a convergence of Kobi-Burks having an untreated mental illness, gender identity issues and substance abuse problems "none of which exist today," he told Flood.

On the other hand, Moore accused her of still displaying anti-social characteristics as recently as the 2014 incident. He argued that Kobi-Burks was a danger to society for losing her temper while being verbally attacked.

"You need to understand that the insanity defense is very rarely invoked and very rarely successful," Heyrman explained to Windy City Times. "In the whole state of Illinois, [there are] only about 350 people who are confined as not guilty by reason of insanity. It's a contentious thing and not well understood even in the criminal justice system by lawyers and judges. So there is this idea about mental illnesses that has played out in an unpleasant way in this case—an idea of 'if you really were insane, you will always be insane,' which is both not what the law says and not what we know about psychiatry and the vast array of mental illnesses including those Mia has been diagnosed with correctly or incorrectly.

"So this gets played upon in these hearings where 'Well, anyone who would be so mentally ill that they would kill somebody must be dangerous for the rest of their lives.' The state sees its job as 'We lost the criminal trial and now we must fight to keep her in the mental hospital and we will use anything we can that is not unethical or illegal.'

"It is an effort to say every bad thing that can be said about Mia that is within the bounds of the law and to convince the judge that [gender identity] is something we don't understand and if we don't understand it we'd better not take any chances. The judge has probably never met a transgender person before and so if this is something he doesn't understand the State's Attorney is going to take advantage of that."

Windy City Times reached out to the Cook County state's attorney for comment on Moore's behavior during the hearings. Spokesman Steve Campbell said the office had started the ball rolling on training for all assistant state's attorneys and staff members that will include education on preferred gender pronouns and the use of "behavioral stereotypes." According to Campbell, the training will take place in the coming months and Moore will be a participant.

Meanwhile, as Kobi-Burks awaits Flood's decision June 23, she is making plans.

"My dream is to open a center where transitioning people can come and feel comfortable learning about the gender role they want to assume in a safe environment," she said. "My transition has afforded me the room emotionally to make the changes I needed to make behaviorally. I'm making better decisions than the ones I used to make because I don't have to operate within a gender role that never fit me. I'm a woman. I'm a better person.

"The biggest lesson I've learned is being honest about your intentions at all times. If you want to help somebody, do it because it is in your heart. There are plenty of people in the world who are in pain, people who are hurting—and we can't ever give up on them."


This article shared 8036 times since Wed Jun 10, 2015
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