California taxpayers are bankrolling gender surgeries for prisoners, with the state spending over $4 million on life-altering procedures for 157 inmates since 2017, according to records reported on by The Washington Free Beacon.
In 2017, California became the first state to pay for prisoners to go under the knife if they wanted to present as the opposite sex. Since then, California has spent $2.5 million on vaginoplasties and hundreds of thousands of dollars on other transgender procedures, such as fake breasts, laser hair removal, and facial feminization, the Free Beacon reported.
Four of the prisoners benefiting from the millions in taxpayer dollars were convicted of crimes that placed them on death row. Prosecutors in the state can still seek the death penalty, but no one has been put to death in California for 17 years, and California Governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2019.
“People who think they’re transgender have rights, and they should be treated with dignity and respect, but it does not include taxpayer dollars being used to do surgeries that are experimental at best and scientifically unjustified at worst,” attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who has represented California inmates, told the Free Beacon.
According to the records reviewed by the Free Beacon, California paid for 35 male prisoners to get artificial vaginas and vulvas, which cost taxpayers $2.5 million, and 11 male prisoners received breast implants which cost more than $180,000. Meanwhile, 40 female inmates had their breasts removed courtesy of the state government for a total of more than $1 million.
The state corrections department said it approves gender surgeries for inmates on a case-by-case basis but it does not place any limits on the type of surgery an inmate can get. As of the early summer of 2023, the department had received over 1,000 requests for “gender-affirming” surgeries since 2017, according to agency records.
The requests for gender surgery more than doubled in California prisons in 2022, and since 2017, the number of trans-identifying prisoners increased by 234%, Cal Matters reported. Earlier this year, a male triple murderer was transferred to a women’s prison after identifying as female.
Men getting into women’s prisons under the guise of identifying as transgender has caused issues for California in the past. In 2021, a women’s rights group filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California after multiple imprisoned women said they were sexually assaulted by male inmates who identified as transgender or “nonbinary,” The Sacramento Bee reported.
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California isn’t the only state using taxpayer dollars to pay for gender surgeries. Both Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have spent millions of dollars for the life-altering procedures on children between 2015 and the spring of this year.