FACT CHECK: Kamala claims taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners is a ‘Trump policy’

THE CLAIM: Harris supporters are responding to a Trump ad by arguing that taxpayer-funded sex surgeries for prisoners “was Donald Trump’s policy … he’s trying to lie to people and say it’s Kamala Harris’ policy.” 

RATING: 🛑 FALSE 🛑

The Trump campaign has been aggressively pushing messaging on the airwaves in the final days against Kamala Harris’s support for “taxpayer-funded sex surgeries for prisoners.” 

At issue are comments then-Senator Harris made in 2019 that she worked to change California law so that transgender inmates could receive gender-affirming surgeries, as well as her response to an ACLU questionnaire that she supported transgender surgeries for detained illegal immigrants.

But Democrats have pushed back by arguing that, in fact, the policy the Trump campaign is critiquing existed under President Trump. 

“I will follow the law and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed. You’re probably familiar with now it’s a public report that under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to, on a medical necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system,” Kamala Harris said in response to a question on the topic during her interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier in October. “And I think frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit like throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house.”

“This was his policy, his Bureau of Prisons policy,” Rick Wilson, affiliated with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, argued recently on MSNBC. “This was Donald Trump’s policy, and he is trying to lie to people and say it’s Kamala Harris’ policy. It’s one more absurdity in a chain of absurdities trying to stoke fear in the Republican base with a lie.” 

Was taxpayer-funding for sex change surgeries for transgender inmates actually a policy under President Trump? Let’s look at the facts. 

Shortly before President Obama left office in January 2017, the Obama Administration issued new guidelines covering how “transgender inmates can access programs and services that meet their needs.” That new guidance included how the federal prison system should house transgender inmates, how pronouns should be used, and approved “hormone or other medical treatment … after an individualized assessment of the requested inmate by institution medical staff,” opening the door to approval for approval of sex surgeries for prisoners.

In 2018, the Trump Administration took action, reversing many of the Obama-era guidelines. Most notably, they required that a prisoner’s biological sex, not gender identity, be used when determining if they should be housed with men or women. The change was in response to a lawsuit by four female inmates who argued that allowing biological men to be housed in their facilities put them at risk. 

The Trump Administration also tightened the Obama-era guidance on medical surgeries by permitting only those deemed “necessary,” which made approval for sex-change surgeries for prisoners a far steeper hill to climb. One transgender prisoner sued the Bureau of Prisons in 2019 during the Trump Administration after that inmate’s request for a sex change surgery was repeatedly declined. The individual, Cristina Nichole Iglesias, ultimately won the case in 2022, two years after President Trump had left office. According to the BOP, Cristina became the first person to ever receive a taxpayer-funded sex change surgery.

When President Biden took office in 2021, he reversed the Trump Administration’s changes and reverted back to the original Obama-era guidance.

CONCLUSION: It’s not accurate to say that the policy was President Trump’s, as it was inherited from the last days of the Obama Administration. Trump officials did take steps to roll it back. While the Trump Administration did not completely reverse the Obama-era guidance opening the door to taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prisoners, it did tighten the rules by allowing only those deemed medically necessary, a change that was later challenged in court by a transgender prisoner who was denied gender-affirming surgery. According to the Bureau of Prisons, no transgender inmate received a taxpayer-funded sex surgery during the Trump Administration. Moreover, while Kamala Harris openly acknowledged in 2019 that she supports taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for prisoners, President Trump has never said he supports the idea. We thus rate the claim that this is a “Trump policy” as FALSE.