Vermont health insurance regulators are planning to tweak Medicaid rules so transgender youth no longer have to wait until age 21 to seek gender-affirming surgery.
The changes are aimed at removing barriers for people seeking a suite of surgeries in order to alleviate gender dysphoria, a conflict between a person’s gender identity and physical gender, said Nissa James, policy director for the Department of Vermont Health Access.
Well, see, that’s one of those things that can swing either way, depending on how you look at it. It’s “removing barriers” or it’s “removing protections” – depending on how terrific you think it is that kids under 18 can get their breasts or penises cut off because they don’t feel at home in their bodies.
The changes would be “enormously positive” for transgender people in Vermont, especially individuals in their late teens, said Dr. Rachel Inker, who runs the Transgender Health Clinic at the Community Health Centers of Burlington.
“Having young people have to wait until they were 21 just didn’t really make any sense,” Inker said.
Because people under 21 absolutely never change their minds about a decision as they get older.
These surgeries are life-saving, said Dana Kaplan, executive director of Outright Vermont, an organization that supports LGBTQ youth.
Gender identity develops as young as three, he said.
“Here is an opportunity to say you can live the life that is authentically yours,” he said. “Why would we get in the way of that?”
Hmm. Let’s see. Because people who are 16 or 14 or 12 don’t invariably know for certain what the life is that is “authentically theirs”? Because in fact people that age are rather famous for being changeable and easily influenced? Because a breast or a penis once cut off is cut off for good? Because you’re supposed to be the adults, not the excitable teenagers?
A “staggering” percentage of transgender and non-binary youth have reported considering suicide, Kaplan said. Having access to medical care that affirms their identity can save young people years of the distress caused by living in a body conflicting with their gender identity.
Or it can cause them a lifetime of distress caused by living in a body that they had mutilated as teenagers.
Comments
16 responses to “Just a little tweak”
Color me surprised that the director of a “Transgender Health Clinic” wants to remove laws that prevent her from expanding her customer base. (not)
Now that some cold water has been poured on the idea that trans people are suffering a staggering murder rate, I wonder if the same might turn out to be true for the suicide rate. Not that I doubt there is a spike in suicide – this is almost guaranteed when talking about a demographic likely to be vilified – but I wonder if it is quite as high as advertised.
Holms @ 2:
The Swedish study came to the conclusion that the rates are largely unchanged between pre- and post-transition persons, iirc. It also cites a lot of other studies that demonstrate conflicting results. The overall conclusion:
“Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.”
Of course, that study was performed many years ago, and the trans* community insists that it’s totally wrong about everything.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885
Consider also that these youths have a “staggering” rate of mental co-morbidities, including schizophrenia, autism, depressive disorder, and anxiety disorders.
. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5825045/
This part of the above study suggests that post-transition suicide rates are higher. So “alleviating gender dysphoria” doesn’t seem to address the “staggering rates of suicide”. Note the “particularly death from suicide”: completed suicides are not a cry for help, they are a genuine desire to be dead.
“The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8–4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide (aHR 19.1; 95% CI 5.8–62.9). Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts (aHR 4.9; 95% CI 2.9–8.5) and psychiatric inpatient care (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 2.0–3.9).”
I saw “Vermont” and “progressive” and “health insurance” and thought they were reviving their single-payer universal health insurance plan (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_health_care_reform#Green_Mountain_Care).
And instead it’s this. Vermont, you’ve let me down again.
*sigh*
They are STILL pushing this bullshit suicide stat.
Liars. Liars who don’t care about vulnerable children.
http://4thwavenow.com/2015/08/03/the-41-trans-suicide-rate-a-tale-of-flawed-data-and-lazy-journalists/
Plus, of course, again:
https://medium.com/@sue.donym1984/the-transgender-movement-and-bad-stats-a-debunking-compilation-31760947b382
‘I’m 17. Can I vote?’
‘No, you’re too young to understand the implications of elections.’
‘Oh, OK. I’ll just go and buy a beer.’
‘Nope. You’re not mature enough to handle alcohol.’
‘Damn! Where’s the nearest tobacconist?’
‘Forget it, kid, you’ve no idea how harmful those things are.’
‘Jeez, mister. How about a gun?’
‘Ha-ha no. Too young to handle a gun.’
‘Nipple piercing?’
‘Fine.’
”Really? Cool.’
‘Oh, but only with your parents’ consent.’
‘Shit! I know, I’ll get a ‘Life ain’t fair’ tattoo.’
‘No you won’t. You’re too young to make a decision about something so permanent. ‘
‘Christ almighty! I’d might as well just have my dick cut off and call myself Cathy.’
Well why didn’t you say that at the start? Come this way, I know just the clinic.’
Well yeah, if the kid gets bombed with wall to wall pink or blue, and is told “No, that’s for boys/girls.” Even if parents are careful, there’s a whole world of sex stereotypes a child is going to take in and try to figure out. Kids figure out language simply by being exposed to it, learning from others, not just their parents. It’s not outlandish to think that a child will pick up the social roles of their culture in the same way. Those careful parents have soaked in it there whole lives, so there’s likely to be a lot of uncoscious cues being given off, care or not. Unless you’ve got a study with controls for that sort of thing, I’m gonna say any “gender identity” possessed by a three year old has been served to them on a pink or blue platter, and is not some ineffable essence the child discovers inside themselves, all on their own.
What about affirmations of other “identities”? What about surgeries for otherkins? Are there otherkin teen? Why is there no push to affirm their identities? Thinking you’ve been born into the wrong species is not much more outlandish than thonking you’ve been born into the wrong body. What if a teenage Rachel Dolezal had demanded medical treatment to darken her skin? Would that have been considered okay? If not in these other cases, why not? They are all demonstrative examples of psychological dispositions or conditions that diverge from reality. Why is the “tran” condition considered worthy of cultivating and indulging up to and including irreversible surgical, when the others aren’t. I feel sorry for the impressionable kids that end up on this path.
I think the medicalization of trans youth reveals one of the inconsistancies of the trans activism. You would think that those who favour self ID would be violently opposed to the surgical mutilation of children because, if self ID proponents were right, it wouldn’t be necessary. If it’s a solution good enough for grown men, why wouldn’t it be applicable for teenagers? You would think that this issue at least (not to mention the contradictory positions of trans, GNC and non-binary people, as well as the appropriation of the intersex narrative as cover, smokescreen and diversionary tactic, allowing TRAs to use the “assigned at birth” vocabulary that really only applies to genuinely intersex people) would be causing huge battles within the trans tent. But no, it would seem that these differences are not yet as important as getting kids to slice, dice and dose themselves for The Cause.
Call my conspiratorial, paranoid or delusional, but I think there’s an underlying strategy behind this. I think the apocryphal teenage suicide rate is being used to create pressure to transition teens medically early, to get them on the trans path before they desist, growing out of feelings and emotions that are just a phase of growing up. (Hell, given the shitty deal girls face in many cultures, it’s a wonder there aren’t more FTM trans cases…) I think that TRAs are pushing this as a form of recruitment, the creation of a cadre of people who are all in, fully invested with their very flesh, into the glitter-rainbow family of the trans cause.
Agreed, plus the increased numbers equals more validation for themselves. They’re probably hoping that more people transitioning will quieten those nagging doubts they have that they actually might be delusional after all. That they have no scruples over how they boost the recruitment figures is neither here nor there, it should be easy enough to convince themselves that they were merely guiding the kids down a path they were taking anyway. I’m certain that the idea that they’ll be ruining so many lives for the sake of their own mental well-being won’t even occur to them; such is the way of narcissists and sociopaths. No sacrifice is so great that they’re unwilling to let somebody else make it for the sake of themselves.
Many of us who were born women have felt a lot of dissatisfaction with our bodies; with our choices; with our world and the expectations it puts on us. Many of us have been fighting for a long time to remove these gendered expectations. I am gender non-conforming, and so is everyone I know. We should all be fighting to end those expectations. Then, once that has happened and you can do what you wish (within your talents and opportunities, of course) no matter what gender, then we will be able to determine the status of people who truly need to transition, if there are any.
Until that time comes, it is impossible to determine how much is just the desire to adopt the expectations of the opposite gender in a society that doesn’t accept you, and how much is a genuine need to be the opposite gender and/or sex.
I am sympathetic, because I have spent my life struggling to find a place in a world that doesn’t accept the way I want to be a woman, but at the same time, I don’t see that what they are describing is particularly different from what I have felt my entire life. My approach has been to try to change society to accept both men who wish to do “feminine” things and women who want to do “masculine” things – make it more about people than sex. Too many now are simply looking to change their own body that is not necessarily flawed to conform with a world that is flawed. It’s selfish and short-sighted.
IWow. Really well put. I think you might have just discovered/described Gender Libertarianism.
Really? Is there some research to support this — to me, rather surprising — claim.
When my own kids were three I don’t recall them any sort of gender identity.
It wasn’t until they started going to school and interacting with a wider social group that they started to become aware that some things are supposed to be for boys and some for girls.
iknklast, nicely said.
Paul, as far as the TRA’s are concerned, a three-year-old boy puts on his mother’s shoes or paints his face with her make-up and, BAM! gender identity crisis.
We’re seeing the same age of young women and girls who were having eating disorders 20 or 30 years ago, in clusters.
Instead of trying to fight puberty by starving themselves, they’re binding their breasts and sneaking testosterone. And if they keep it quiet enough, there’s enough “support” out there that Mom & Dad don’t even have to know.
Until it’s too late.
Moreover, early studies show a majority of kids who show up early as “gender non-conforming” grow up to be gay or lesbian if left untransitioned.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313890859_Childhood_Gender-Typed_Behavior_and_Adolescent_Sexual_Orientation_A_Longitudinal_Population-Based_Study