Who is paying for gender confirmation or gender reassignment surgery for prisoners?  The answer : You are.  Gender reassignment surgery for gender dysphoria in inmates is being reimbursed by taxpayers.  A recent article highlighted the issue of transgender surgery and the issue of who is paying the bills at least in Idaho.

The gender reassignment surgery costs roughly $75,000.  This is but one expense.  Other surgeries including facial feminization, breast augmentation, hip and butt augmentation are all procedures that could potentially be performed to put the expenses well into 6 figures.

The prisoner in Idaho who received the surgery took the state to court to receive the surgery.  The state has spent half a million dollars on legal fees to this point to block prisoners from getting this surgery in the future.  The lower courts have deemed that prisoners should receive the surgery at taxpayer expense.

The U.S. Supreme Court has not heard the case, so it has not set the precedent on the question of whether state prison systems must provide gender confirmation surgery as a treatment for gender dysphoria if needed.   If the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t take the case, the decisions made by the lower courts will stand as precedent.

This means that if a prisoner is deemed to have gender dysphoria and pushes hard enough for the procedure, the state and the prison systems will have to comply and the taxpayer will have to foot some fairly enormous surgical bills.

Dr. Kenneth Hughes performs facial and body feminization surgeries  as well as masculinization surgeries his Los Angeles surgery center.