Warren Says Inmates Are 'Entitled' to Taxpayer-Funded Transgender Surgery
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren backtracked this week with regard to her feelings on taxpayer-funded transition surgery for transgender prison inmates.
The flip-flop came Thursday, The Daily Wire reported, when Warren was asked at CNN’s LGBT town hall — co-hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy organization — whether she regretted saying during her 2012 Senate run that transgender individuals should not receive transition surgery at no personal cost while in prison.
Wasting no time, the Massachusetts Democrat forsook her previous position — going so far as to say transgender convicts are “entitled” to free sex-change operations.
“Senator, quick follow, speak to your evolution on this,” CNN host Chris Cuomo told Warren.
“In the 2012 campaign for Senate, you criticized a judge’s decision that granted transition-related surgery to a transgender inmate. You said, ‘I don’t think it’s a good use of taxpayer dollars,'” Cuomo continued. “Do you regret that?”
“Yup!” Warren replied.
“It was a bad answer,” the senator said. “And I think it was a bad answer. And I believe that everyone is entitled to medical care — and medical care that they need.”
“And that includes people who are transgender who, it is the time for them to have gender-affirming surgery. I just think that’s important,” she added.
Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says Americans should have their hard-earned tax dollars go to pay for prison inmates to go through transgender surgery
Warren says the locked-up criminals are “entitled” to it pic.twitter.com/Q5Fm12iXnA
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 11, 2019
When The Heritage Foundation compiled results for the most comprehensive, long-term medical studies done on the topic in Sweden and the U.S. in recent years, gender reassignment surgery was shown to have no impact in decreasing suicide rates or increasing long-term happiness among transgender individuals.
In fact, the Swedish Karolinska Institute’s 30-year study found that surgically reassigned transgender individuals in their research sample had a suicide rate 20 times higher than that of their peers in the general population.
This did not, however, stop Warren from advocating for the procedure as a valid medical solution for those with gender dysphoria.
On one occasion, Warren took a question from 9-year-old Jacob Lemay, who was born biologically female but identified as a boy.
Warren pledged to Lemay that she would introduce policies to make elementary school transgender-inclusive.
According to The Daily Wire, Warren also suggested in a statement Thursday that one of her first orders of business as president would be to overturn the Trump administration’s policy of imprisoning transgender convicts based on their birth sex rather than their preferred gender.
“I will direct the Bureau of Prisons to end the Trump Administration’s dangerous policy of imprisoning transgender people in facilities based on their sex assigned at birth,” Warren said.
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