A Toronto transsexual killer who was given sex toys while at an Edmonton women's prison has been transferred from the jail after threatening staff and vandalizing the building.

Synthia Kavanagh -- who made national headlines after winning the right to have a sex-change operation while in prison -- was sent last week to the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener from the Edmonton Institution for Women, sources say.

Kavanagh was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years for the 1987 hammer slaying in Toronto of a transsexual prostitute, Leo James Black, 23, also known as Lisa Janna Black.

"I see our government bending over backwards to accommodate the interests of prisoners and forgetting the entire role of prisons is to protect society and to reform some prisoners," said Conservative justice critic Vic Toews.

"What it appears to me is the government is trying to accommodate the interests of the prisoner and, quite frankly, forgetting the interests of taxpayers."

Cathy Stocki of the Correctional Service of Canada said the agency changed its policy in 2001 to pay for "sex-reassignment surgery" in those cases where it is considered essential by a gender-identity expert.

In 1999, Kavanagh complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission that she was being discriminated against on the grounds of disability and sex because she was denied hormone therapy and a sex change.

Toews said while taxpayers are ready to fund corrections, they want the government to focus on the key goals of jails, which are to rehabilitate prisoners and detain them.

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