A day prior to the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, CNN reported a scoop: in 2019, presidential candidate Kamala Harris told the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that she supported “taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.” 

The story gained traction on X prior to the debate, and it’s not difficult to see why. Compelling Americans to pay for the sex changes of federal inmates and jailed immigrants is not a policy supported by a majority of Americans, which is probably why then-candidate Joe Biden declined to answer the question, as did other candidates.

The unpopularity of Harris’s stance is also likely why her political opponent brought it up during the debate. What’s notable is that the policy, which sounds like a Babylon Bee headline, was strange enough to fool members of the media who couldn’t fathom that Harris would support it. Susan Glasser of The New Yorker accused Trump of lying and creating the story out of thin air.

“[Trump’s] line about how the Vice-President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison’ was pretty memorable,” Glasser wrote. “What the hell was he talking about? No one knows…”

To anyone who saw CNN’s story, it was clear what Trump was referring to. Just as it would be to any journalist or fact-checker who had access to Google and did his due diligence. 

People make mistakes, of course, but one week after the debate, The New Yorker still hadn’t corrected Glasser’s article, and many on X had made note of the error. 

Putting the credulity of reporters and the credibility of editorial standards aside, the flap over taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for inmates is a policy worth examining. It might seem like a fringe issue, but it can illuminate interesting economic ideas.

For starters, Harris’s support of the policy can be understood through the lens of public choice theory, a branch of economics that suggests public officials arrive at decisions much like everyone else: through self interest. While it’s doubtful Harris would today vocalize her support for such a policy, her incentives were different in 2019 when, as CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski observed, Harris was “trying to get to the left of Bernie Sanders.”

To call her positions self-interested does not condemn Harris in particular: public choice theory would suggest that few politicians reach decisions purely on principle

And then there’s the matter of costs, which would be relatively small and highly dispersed, so much so that they could seem entirely free. Many might argue, Why shouldn’t we provide these surgeries?

It’s a more difficult question to answer than many might think. I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode “The Airport” where Jerry is flying first class. He is sitting next to a beautiful swimsuit model and they are enjoying warm towels, champagne, and ice cream sundaes.

“More anything,” the flight attendant asks, as she takes away their ice cream dishes. 

“More everything!” Jerry responds.

Many of us accept “free” things all the time when they are offered to us. But we live in a world of scarcity, and there are no free lunches. Whether it’s champagne on a flight or a prison sex-change operation, someone is paying. 

In Jerry’s case, he paid for the ice cream and champagne himself, which was included when he bought his ticket. The resources for taxpayer-funded sex changes for federal inmates aren’t coming from an individual voluntarily paying. Those dollars will come from taxpayers, who are being ordered to pay. 

Americans have different ideas on taxation, of course. Some, like myself, view it as a kind of legalized plunder, to borrow a description from the 19th century economist Frédéric Bastiat, who explained how it can be identified. 

“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong,” Bastiat wrote in The Law. “See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

Some people believe taxation is appropriate, if spent on a “public good.” This squishy phrase is prone to problems, and it still ignores the scarcity problem. There’s only so much stuff to go around, and resources spent on one thing cannot be spent on another..

In other words, federally funded sex change operations have an opportunity cost. 

Dollars allocated for gender reassignment surgeries cannot be spent on fighter jets, classroom projects, employee salaries, highways, food stamps, worker pensions, cancer research, border security, cruise missiles, or anything else. 

Some people will say this is good. Many of the things on that list are bad, they reason, or perhaps that gender reassignment operations are more important than everything else.
 
But few people will take that view. So few, in fact, that The New Yorker believed the whole story was made up.