Under Biden Proposal, Everyone Including Kids Could More Easily Get Transgender Surgery
The Biden administration is pushing for more insurers, and thus anyone who buys their insurance, to cover transgender surgeries. Such genital, breast, and facial surgery, as well as hormone therapy and more, would be considered “medically necessary” for those wishing to identify with the other sex.
Discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability is prohibited in federally funded health-care facilities under the Affordable Care Act, passed during the Obama administration. A proposed rule, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on January 5, would add “sexual orientation and gender identity” to that list.
The rule “places ideology ahead of sound medicine,” the Ethics and Public Policy Center said in a comment Thursday opposing the rule. It “is without legal support, contradicts long-standing scientific understandings of the human person, attempts to evade court injunctions, promotes harm to patients (especially minors), tramples religious freedom,” and more, according to the EPPC.
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by the federal program Medicaid in some states. Some insurers also already cover the procedures.
“Nearly half of transgender respondents in one survey said their health insurance company denied them gender affirming [sic] surgery, and a similar proportion reported that they were denied coverage for hormone therapy,” the proposed rule states, in reference to a Center for American Progress study.
Kids Included Despite the Evidence
The rule appears to offer no exclusion for children, Roger Severino, a senior fellow at the EPPC, told The Federalist. It would “put kids on a transgender treadmill and they don’t get off,” Severino said. Children could take puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones only to regret it later when they have damaged their bodies and may find they are infertile, he said.
Indeed, the rule offers legal cover to “those experimenting on these kids,” according to Severino, who was the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights during the Trump administration. By requiring insurers to cover such surgeries, the rule will make it much harder for adolescents to sue later, he said.
There is no medical consensus that such treatments help with gender dysphoria, and leading health authorities around the world are ending or curtailing opposite-sex interventions for minors, according to the EPPC scholars.
“It is well known that symptoms of gender dysphoria in children naturally resolve with little to no intervention in 61-98% of cases and that once a child is placed on transition, including through medical intervention, the odds of persistence skyrocket,” the EPPC scholars wrote in their comments on the rule.
It’s also not clear how the nondiscrimination provisions will apply to religious organizations and people. HHS needs to explain how it will enforce the proposed nondiscrimination provisions in ways that comply with conscience and religious freedom protection laws, the EPPC says.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/31/under-biden-proposal-everyone-including-kids-could-more-easily-get-transgender-surgery/