The state has filed its appeal of a federal judge’s ruling ordering the Department of Correction to provide sex reassignment surgery to an inmate convicted of murder. In court papers filed Tuesday in US District Court in Boston, lawyers for the corrections commissioner asked for a stay of the order granting the surgery to the inmate, known as Michelle Kosilek, until the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rules on the appeal. Kosilek was born Robert Kosilek but began transitioning to a female identity in 1990, the year that she strangled her then-wife. She has been staying in a men’s prison while taking hormones and developing female physical qualities.