In 1980, Rodney James Quine and an accomplice kidnapped and shot a 33-year-old father of three in downtown Los Angeles. The victim, Shahid Ali Baig, begged for his life to be spared.
It was not.
Thirty-seven years later, the taxpayers of California funded Quine’s sex change operation.
This January, Quine, who is serving a life sentence and now goes by Shiloh, became the first American inmate to receive a taxpayer-funded sex change operation after settling a lawsuit with the state of California in 2015. Now, the Associated Press is reporting that Quine wants the prison to provide electrolysis for hair removal.
Quine was transferred to a men’s prison last month. Per the prison’s policy, it does not provide razors while inmates undergo evaluations to determine whether they will harm themselves or others. This week, a corrections department spokesperson confirmed to the AP that Quine is “nearly finished” with that vetting process. Nevertheless, Quine claims facial hair is having a “huge impact on day to day life” and is demanding a federal judge order the prison to provide electrolysis, “or at least a razor,” according to the AP.
In January, Baig’s daughter reacted to the news about her father’s murderer undergoing surgery at taxpayers’ expense with disgust, remarking, “It just made me dizzy and sick. I’m helping pay for his surgery; I live in California. It’s kind of like a slap in the face.”
But in its settlement with Quine, California acknowledged several experts’ consensus that sex-reassignment surgery was “a medically necessary treatment” for the inmate. At the time of the settlement, a director at the Transgender Law Center said that while it wasn’t “precedent-setting in the general sense,” others will be able to look to the case “to develop policies that are compliant with the constitutional requirement to provide medical care to inmates.”
In other words, expect cases like Quine’s to amass as society wades further into the territory of embracing radical concepts regarding sex and gender on an institutional level.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
