California Spends $4 Million on Gender Surgeries for Prisoners, Death Row Inmates

For the last six years, the state of California has spent over $4 million of taxpayer money on gender surgeries for prisoners throughout the state, including several death row inmates.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the money spent since 2017 has covered so-called “sex change” surgeries and other forms of “gender-affirming” treatment for 157 prisoners, with 4 of those prisoners being on death row. Of that money, $2.5 million was spent on vaginoplasties, with hundreds of thousands more spent on fake breast implants, laser hair removal, and facial reconstruction surgeries.

As of the summer of 2023, over 1,000 prisoners had submitted petitions for some form of transgender treatment.

“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,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer and Republican National Committee chairwoman from California.

The $2.5 million spent on vaginoplasties covered just 35 male prisoners over the six-year period. Another 11 men received breast implants, which altogether cost over $180,000, while just two received “facial feminization” surgeries at a cost of $184,141. A further 69 male prisoners underwent laser hair removal, costing $224,000, and 40 female prisoners had their breasts removed, procedures which cost over $1 million in total.

This year alone, corrections agency officials in California requested roughly $2.2 million in additional funding purely for transgender operations. Among those costs were the hiring of two more full-time psychiatrists, one physician, one part-time surgeon, and two social workers.

California became the first state in the nation to mandate the use of taxpayer dollars for prisoners’ transgender surgeries back in 2017, with the state’s corrections department admitting that there are no limits to the treatments or surgeries that prisoners can request. The mandate was implemented following a legal settlement in 2016 with male prisoner Shiloh Quine, who sued the state of California for the “right” to be recognized as transgender and thus receive certain treatments and protections. Quine’s lawsuit was represented by the Transgender Law Center, a far-left organization funded by George Soros.

Back in 2014, only 131 inmates throughout the state of California identified as transgender. As of November of 2023, the number is now 1,847, with hundreds more identifying as “non-binary.”