What would you consider public funding of transgender care?

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How would you consider public funding of transgender health care within currently existing public programs, to include hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery? Please answer in the poll below.

I voted for the last - medical.

I don't understand it. I'm not transgender. But I don't think they are enough of a cost to the average citizen that it's worth worrying about much. I say fine.

Here comes the cat amongst the pigeons

I wouldn't. There would me more worthwiile causes to spend public money on within health care.

I'm sure it is important to some people and I won't belittle them if they want it, but in no way is that necessary medical care so public funding is out of the question.

Those who think it is not necessary surgery - do you know how the suicide rate for pre-op trans people compares with the death rates for various treatments that we consider necessary?

I live in Belgium

If you want to see a psychologist you have to pay it yourself.

A muslim female that 'needs' to have her virginity restored can have it done on public money.

Belgium has one of the highest suicide rates of Western Europe.

Needless to say very few of them are muslim girls

Considering ourselves responsible for all gender confusion related suicides is quite a slippery slope when we conflate it with paying to give people necessary treatment in order to keep them from medical harm related to their conditions. Just because we don't want the whole system held hostage to whether or not someone might commit suicide does not mean that we aren't sympathetic or understanding. I wonder how far this line of argument would get if we were to extend the same logic to a whole host of other reasons people might commit suicide because they didn't receive a surgery that wasn't medically necessary. If you want to use that logic, then you have to accept every other conclusion that necessarily follows from such a premise.

It is not a necessity.

We don't need to provide services for everything under the sun...we can't afford it.

It would be at the bottom of the list of things that should be paid for even if it made the list.

If you want to kill yourself because you feel you are in the "wrong body," you need to be in therapy or institutionalized because you are a danger to yourself or others. Living with disappointment is a requirement of living. I could justify hurting myself for a lot of things that I wasn't born with...that doesn't entitle me to have society pay for surgeries or treatments to give me what nature did not.

The last option doesnt even make sense.

How can it be "purely medical"?

If the taxpayer pays for it then its also political.



If the group in question has a high suicide rate then have the taxpayer pay for their prosac, but not for the sex change operations and lifelong hormone treatment.

You misunderstand. Unless, of course, I misunderstand you.

Transgender dysphoria is a recognised medical condition. The necessary treatment for it is SRS.
Transgender dysphoria makes people much more likely to commit suicide, and SRS drastically reduces that risk (though it is still higher post-op because of discrimination).
Compare it for treatments for broken bones, or kidney stones, or deafness, or blindness, or malaria, or pneumonia. All these conditions are less deadly than gender dysphoria. Is treating any of those things "unnecessary"?


I think this is a silly suggestion. It's pretty well recognised that tackling the cause of depression etc. is better than giving anti-depressants. Indeed, this applies generally.

Hmmm... I am pretty conversant in child development but I've never heard of this condition. If it is indeed a condition with a solid medical basis as you say, then I don't see any problem with SRS. However, not to sound draconian but the idea of it being a medical condition is fairly new to me so I would be interested to see if you have any literature on it you'd like to refer to me. For the time being I'll have to look it up, although I'm not too fond of wiki and I don't have access to diagnostic manuals aside from DSM and ICM any more.

I picked none of them. None of the options fit at all.

There should be some private insurance that should be able to cover it, but to say everyone's hard earned money should go to such a cause would upset a lot of people, and it wouldn't be right to take it away.

If private healthcare insurance covers it, that is fine. Private insurance companies can cover the addition of extra arms if they wanted too.

But it shouldn't be the duty of everyone to do so.

Whether or not insurance companies should cover this, should be entirely up to them. It should not be funded by the public, though. I've got nothing against transgendered people, but a line has to be drawn on what the public should and should not cover. The welfare systems across the globe are on a very tight budget as it is.

Here's the Merck Manual online for it:

http://www.merckmanuals.com/professiona ... alism.html

It gives a summary, the etiology, the symptoms and signs, how to diagnose, and treatment.

Here's an excerpt from the section on treatment:

Last edited by beneficii on 04 Apr 2014, 11:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

If you're willing to have some transgender people go without access to medically necessary treatments while non-transgender people get all of theirs, then I must say, you're not much of a friend of the transgender community.

A sex change is what we are talking about. If they are people, they get what everyone else does.

Sex reassignment surgery is not medically necessary.