The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed with a lower court that the State of Idaho must pay for a sex offender's gender-reassignment surgery – and one family advocate is warning of the unintended consequences of that decision.

Mason Edmo, 31, (pictured) who goes by the name "Adree," sued the State of Idaho for refusing to pay for his gender-reassignment surgery. Edmo claims it "amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and causes severe distress" because Edmo – in prison for sexual abuse of a child – has gender dysphoria.

Doreen Denny, senior director of government relations for Concerned Women for America, doesn't see the Ninth Circuit's decision as much of a surprise.

"But what we're seeing are activist judges who are imposing a very aggressive view and an activist view about transgenders on the rest of America and asking us to pay for it as well," Denny said on the "Washington Watch" radio program.

Denny

"What's particularly disconcerting in this case is you have a sex offender in prison serving a sentence for a sexual assault against an individual, a minor – and somehow they think that this male person transitioning to a female, and then possibly put into a female prison, is not going to have these issues any longer. In fact, we've seen in other cases quite the opposite."

Denny pointed to the case of Karen White in the United Kingdom. Born Stephen Terence Wood, White was moved from a male prison to a female prison where Denny says White proceeded to rape female inmates.

"This is the kind of problem that we have when we're not only considering bowing to the gender notions of a particular person but specifically a person who is imprisoned for crimes against others that are sexual in nature," she added.

That, Denny argues, is really what people need to be worried about at this time. "It's not just the fact that we would have taxpayers paying for this surgery," she explained, "but the fact that even in doing so, it could lead to further consequences about where [transgender male prisoners are] housed, where they're located, the access that they have to [biological] female prisoners who don't have an ability to be free themselves, and the kind of consequences that could come as a result of that."