A man who killed a couple by tying them to a boat anchor and throwing them overboard two decades ago will be transferred to a women’s prison thanks to a California policy Vice President Kamala Harris helped implement that provides taxpayer funding for inmate sex change operations.

Skylar Deleon was sentenced to death for masterminding and carrying out the gruesome 2004 murders of Thomas and Jackie Hawks. Initially sentenced to death for the crimes, Deleon recently obtained a publicly funded sex change operation under a California policy Ms. Harris claimed credit for implementing as California attorney general a decade ago.

“I think it’s outrageous,” Gayle Hawks, 88, told The Washington Times.

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Ms. Hawks is angry that the man who killed her daughter, 47, and son-in-law, 57, received the sex change operation. Defense attorneys said Deleon’s need for money to finance sex reassignment surgery was the motivation for the Hawks murders. The state and federal governments paid the cost of the operation and medical care.

“My daughter and son-in-law can’t live their lives because he cut them short. And now he’s living what he wanted to do in the first place. He’s got his sex change,” she said. “And I think Kamala should have left her nose out of it.”

Ms. Harris has been under fire for past statements in support of taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for prison inmates and detained migrants. On Wednesday, she sidestepped a question about whether, as president, she would back federal funding for prisoners or illegal immigrants to obtain the operations. In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier this week, she said she would “follow the law” on the matter if she is elected.

In California, Ms. Harris said she helped reform state policy on the issue, paving the way for taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prisoners and setting a standard that has spread to other states.

Ms. Harris bragged five years ago that while she was the state’s attorney general, from 2011 to 2017, she led the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to establish a policy allowing inmates to undergo gender transition care, including sex change operations.

In an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that Ms. Harris filled out while running for president in 2019, she said, “As Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates.”

In a 2019 press conference at Howard University, Ms. Harris elaborated on her role.

She told The Washington Blade, an LGBTQ publication, that she “worked behind the scenes to ensure that the Department of Corrections would allow transitioning inmates to receive the medical attention that they required, they needed and deserved,” but she distanced herself from the California attorney general’s office efforts in 2015 to block transgender medical surgery a male inmate was seeking.

An apologetic Ms. Harris told The Blade that she “vehemently disagreed” with legal briefs advanced by her office to appeal a court ruling granting a sex change operation to the inmate.

“And it was an office with a lot of people who would do the work on a daily basis, and do I wish that sometimes they would have personally consulted me before they wrote the things that they wrote?” Ms. Harris said. “Yes, I do.”

Defenders of Ms. Harris point out that several courts have ruled in favor of transgender inmates. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2022 to provide a sex change operation for a man imprisoned for threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction.

A 2023 Supreme Court ruling let stand a federal appeals court decision that found people with gender dysphoria are protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The appeals court sided with a male plaintiff who was denied hormone medications and housed behind bars with men even though he identified as a woman.

Ms. Harris’ defenders said the change in California law allowing inmates to obtain sex change operations was part of a settlement after the prisoner sued.

The vice president championed those changes and said she helped implement them, even though she has gone mostly silent on the issue now that she is the Democratic presidential nominee in a race that will depend on moderate swing state voters.

On the 2019 ACLU questionnaire, Ms. Harris said she backs policies ensuring federal prisoners and detainees can obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgery.

“Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment,” she wrote.

The Harris campaign and Ms. Harris have pointed to President Trump’s leadership on the issue.

Mr. Trump moved to reverse some Obama-era policies favoring the rights of transgender federal prisoners but did not eliminate the Obama administration’s change allowing prisoners to obtain sex change operations at taxpayer expense.

Instead, federal prison officials during the Trump administration said they were required to follow a statutory mandate to provide basic medical and mental health care to federal inmates.

Medical care for “offenders with transgender needs,” they said, was “an urgent and impactful challenge,” and treatment for those prisoners “may include pharmaceutical interventions (e.g., cross-gender hormone therapy), hair removal and surgery (if individualized assessment indicates surgical intervention is applicable).”

No prisoner obtained a sex change operation while Mr. Trump was president, and his administration reversed an Obama-era rule requiring prison officials to consider an offender’s gender identity when assigning a prison. The Biden-Harris administration reinstated the Obama-era rule despite a lawsuit from female prisoners who said housing biological men with them resulted in threats to their physical and mental health and safety.

The Bureau of Prisons said 1,492 transgender women and 769 transgender men are in federal custody.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has aggressively attacked Ms. Harris on the issue and is running ads in battleground states during NFL games that highlight Ms. Harris’ support of federal funding for sex change operations for prisoners and illegal immigrants.

During the Fox interview, Ms. Harris tied Mr. Trump to transgender surgeries for prisoners.

“I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” she said. “Under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available on a medical necessity basis to people in the federal prison system. And I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house.”

Deleon, 45, who is serving life without parole, told The Washington Free Beacon this week that he underwent sex reassignment surgery and breast augmentation surgery in April 2023.

Defenders of the California policy say such surgeries require careful vetting using “conservative” criteria.

It’s no comfort to Ms. Hawks.

Deleon and several accomplices lured her daughter and her husband out on their boat in November 2004 after pretending Deleon and his wife were interested in purchasing it.

They used a stun gun to incapacitate the couple and forced them to sign over ownership of the 55-foot yacht, Well Deserved.

The gang, led by Deleon, handcuffed the couple’s arms behind their backs, duct-taped their eyes and mouths, tied them to the anchor and threw them overboard. Their bodies were never recovered.

“They’re given rights that their victims don’t have anymore. My daughter and son-in-law have no rights. They’re dead, they’re gone,” Ms. Hawks said. “Their family suffers. I just don’t feel he’s been treated the way he should be.”