While middle-class Americans who have never committed a crime cannot get the government to pay for their healthcare, convicted felon Chelsea Manning, who legally changed his name from Bradley, is going to be provided an elective “sex reassignment” operation, courtesy of US taxpayers. The Army’s reversal was announced in an ACLU press release.

A former intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning is serving a 35-year sentence in the military prison in Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., for giving classified materials to Wikileaks that revealed key intelligence about secret US military activities in the Middle East. Unlike Edward Snowden, who restricted the material  he leaked, Manning leaked all the materials he had. In doing so, he put many lives at risk.

Manning’s Gender Dysphoria

The Army had previously allowed him hormone treatment, speech therapy, and cosmetics, but repeatedly denied his request for an operation. His Army psychologist recommended he have it. Although the Army will now pay for the operation, it still requires him to keep his hair at the two-inch maximum for men, and a suit to let him grow his hair out to the length allowed women continues.

He will be the first prisoner in the US to receive such a procedure. A court has ordered the state of California to pay for another inmate’s sex change, but the inmate, who is serving a life sentence, has not yet had the operation. The Army pays for sex reassignment operations of troops, a policy that started in July.

Manning, whom military doctors had diagnosed as suffering from “gender dysphoria,” began hormone therapy in 2015, went on a hunger strike when he was first told that his sex change operation would not be paid for. In July, he attempted to commit suicide over the denial.

“I am unendingly relieved that the military is finally doing the right thing. I applaud them for that. This is all that I wanted — for them to let me be me,” Manning said in a statement released by the ACLU.

Though eligible for parole in six years, he is now facing charges for the suicide attempt that could lengthen his sentence or put him in solitary confinement. His lawyers call for those charges to be dropped, arguing that the military’s treatment drove him to it.

The Real Effects of Sex Reassignment Surgery

According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are over 3,200 incarcerated transgendered people in prison. One facility that posted its fees online charges about $20,000 for creating a vagina and $8,000 for creating breasts, including three nights in the hospital. (It offers several other options, including buttock and calf augmentation and several reconstructions to make the face more feminine.) This does include the preparatory treatments, including hormones and counseling, as well as the possible psychiatric care for years afterward. Female to male surgery is much more expensive.

Since the majority of inmates are male, going with a conservative estimate, if all 3,200 inmates wanted male to female sex transitions, at an average cost of $28,000, the cost to taxpayers would be just under $90 million for the surgery alone. Pre- and post-op care would greatly increase those costs.

However, it probably does not work, even from the transexual person’s point of view. According to a medical review conducted for the liberal English newspaper The Guardian several years ago, “There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation.” According to a survey published last year by the Williams Institute, a think tank for LGBT issues at UCLA School of Law, from 25 to 43 percent of transgendered people attempt suicide, from five to nine times the rate of the rest of the American population.

Walt Heyer of Sex Change Regret, who had the surgery and lived as a female for eight years before changing back — he says now that he lived as “just a man in a dress” — says the media unfortunately now hides this kind of information, although the negative results keep piling up. Writing in The Federalist, he noted that studies have shown from 60 to 90 percent of transgenders suffer from mental illnesses unrelated to their gender dysphoria, and 20 percent who have a sex change regret it.

Moreover, Heyer believes for many individuals the feeling of gender dysphoria is only temporary. “Studies show 77 to 94 percent of young people who identify with gender dysphoria will not identify as gender dysphoria as adults,” he told Mercatornet.

After Manning receives the surgery, will that extinguish his desire to commit suicide? Sadly, based on the studies and the statistics, maybe not.