Harris was asked about taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery for prisoners, a policy she has in the past said she supports.
Asked if she would as president advocate for taxpayer dollars to be used to that end, she responded: “I will follow the law.”
When pressed for more details, she said such surgeries had been available to prisoners during while Trump was in office.
However, no transgender surgeries took place in the federal prison system while Trump was president.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons told BBC Verify that two federal inmates have had gender reassignment operations – the first in 2022 and the second in 2023.
When Harris was running as a Democratic candidate for president in 2019, she checked a box in a questionnaire from a civil rights group saying that as president, she would use her authority to ensure that transgender-identifying detainees in prison and immigration facilities would have access to “treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care”.
The Harris campaign has said this “is not what she is proposing or running on” in the 2024 election.
