A transgender woman convicted of killing a couple to try to get money for her sex change ended up having the procedure covered by California taxpayers — thanks to radical policies backed by VP Kamala Harris.
The notorious so-called “Yacht Killer” — who was born John Jacobson Jr. and now goes by Skylar Deleon — is currently serving life without parole after initially being sentenced to death for the slaying of Thomas Hawks, 57, and his wife Jackie, 47, in 2004.
Deleon, 45, duped the couple into letting them and several associates board their 55-foot yacht and take them out on it after feigning interest in purchasing the vessel.
While out at sea somewhere between Newport Harbor and Santa Catalina, Deleon used a stun gun to incapacitate the couple and forced them to give up their bank-account information and sign over the boat’s title — before tying them to the anchor and tossing it overboard.
After the horrific crime, Deleon and the accomplices helped themselves to a few beers from the dead couple’s below-deck fridge and enjoyed an afternoon of fishing.
Last year, nearly two decades after the murders, the killer finally got a sex-change operation — courtesy of California taxpayers. She is now waiting to be transferred to a women’s prison.
“I did receive gender affirming surgery and breast augmentation on April 5th, 2023,” Deleon wrote in a letter to the Washington Free Beacon, who reached out to her for an update on the status of her transition.
California’s policy of providing hormone treatment for prison inmates who identify as transgender predated Harris’ 2010 election to state attorney general. Then during her time in office, the state’s prison system ramped up its gender-related surgical offerings to convicts, allowing the first inmate sex change in the country in 2015.
That year, inmate Jeffrey Bryan Norsworthy, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, sued the California prison system to force it to pay for his sex change. A federal judge sided with Norsworthy on the grounds that such a procedure was considered required healthcare for inmates under the state’s constitution.
In her capacity as the Golden State’s top cop, Harris argued that the surgery wasn’t medically necessary, even vowing to appeal the case after a district judge ruled against the state. But no appeal was ever filed, and then-Gov. Jerry Brown green-lit Norsworthy to be paroled before the state wound up on the hook for his surgery.
It was the last documented time Harris exhibited a glimmer of common sense on the matter, critics say.
While the state was battling Norsworthy in court, another convicted murderer serving life — Rodney Quine — also sued the state demanding they cover his sex change. The state’s Justice Department — led by Harris — failed to stop a settlement agreement in which California taxpayers would pay not only for Quine’s sex change but also hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, the Beacon writes.
She later took responsibility for her office’s filings on the issue at a campaign trail press conference in 2019 — while blaming her position on the state’s Department of Corrections, the Washington Blade wrote.
“I was … the attorney general of California for two terms, and I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent, and I couldn’t fire my clients, and there are unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs,” she said.
Quine would become the first — and far from the last — convicted murderer in the state given a sex-change operation on the taxpayer dime.
Upon the announcement of the settlement, California unveiled sweeping changes to how it deals with the issue of trans inmates moving forward, ushering in an even more radical policy.
“California has become the first state with a policy of providing sex reassignment surgery for some prison inmates,” the New York Times wrote at the time.
Covered procedures would include mastectomies and genital reconstructions.
As her political aspirations grew, Harris fell over herself backing taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgery for inmates.
In a 2019 interview with the National Center for Transgender Equity during her failed bid for the White House, Harris went so far as to boast that she played a key role in California changing its policy “so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and need,” calling the policy “an issue of humanity.”
That same year, Harris vowed in a questionnaire distributed to candidates by the far-left American Civil Liberties Union that if elected president, she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”
Between 2017 and 2022, the California prison and jail population experienced a 234% increase in the number of inmates identifying as trans or “nonbinary,” according to a report in CalMatters last year.
The same report said the state expects 462 prisoners will request sex-change operations in 2024, while the current medical staff can only accommodate three such procedures per week.
The Harris-Walz campaign has avoided talking about the issue in depth during the campaign. A rep told CNN last month that “as President, [Harris] will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress.”
The Trump campaign has seized on the issue to paint Harris as out of touch with the priorities of average Americans, frequently airing an attack ad blasting her for her support for taxpayer-funded inmate sex change operations with the tagline, “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Reached by email Tuesday, a Harris-Walz spokesperson referred The Post to a recent appearance on Fox News by the campaign’s communications director, Michael Tyler, in which he stated the ACLU questionnaire “is not what [VP Harris] is proposing or running on.
The campaign offered no further comment on the matter.