California since 2017 has spent more than $4 million of taxpayer money on surgical sex changes and cosmetic "gender-affirming" enhancements for 157 inmates, including 4 on death row, according to records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Why spend thousands of dollars on gender affirming care, when the California tax payers will pay for you to transition?
Note how the user's title says "on gender surgeries", while the article instead says "gender-affirming 'enhancements'", this means that testosterone and estrogen are likely also counted on the statistic.
(4.000.000$ / 157 inmates) / 6 years = 4.246,28$ per inmate per year
I get varying stats on the cost of gender-affirming surgeries, as they seem to vary a lot from country to country and from year to year. This image seems to illustrate the disparities. We should assume that California is on the more expensive end of the spectrum.
With this data in mind, let's take the most practical approach possible. If we have a prisoner who is socially accepted to have been trying to transition, changed their name, their appearance, their demeanor, and so on, putting them on a prison for their gender assigned at birth is likely to generate situations of abuse with regards to other inmates; while putting them on a prison for the gender they've transitioned to while they're still far away from a relatively stereotypical image of their gender might as well provokes frictions unless you give them medical support to continue or maintain that transition. A trans man in a male prison who stops receiving testosterone is going to become a likely victim of abuse; a trans man in a female prison is going to become a reason of outrage. So just give them the treatment they need.
But someone may still think this is a disproportionate amount of money to spend on a prisoner, making them unreasonably more costly to maintain. Well,
At the federal level, U.S. taxpayers likely spend just north of $40,000 per year to incarcerate someone in a federal prison. Based on data from Vera, Interrogating Justice’s Ronnie K. Stephens estimates that number to range between $14,000 and $70,000 in most states.
4.000$ extra dollars per year might be a noticeable bump, but compare it to other medical needs prisoners may have:
Unfortunately, there is no price tag on cancer. Patients can spend anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 annually on their treatment.
Do we stop treating prisoners for cancer too?
So yeah, this whole article is pointless rage-bait for a logical but relatively unknown consequence of applying the same principles of a Western prison system to everyone equitably and fairly, but now you also have strong data to wipe the floor with it.
As much as we can know, it's legit. Hell, it's the one mentioned in the sidebar of this place.
They explain in detail their rating, with sources. That's the most important one. Then, they have transparency on their funding and they are highly reviewed by fellow fact-checkers.
There's not much more one can do without doing a systematic review of their ratings.