Don't Force Taxpayers To Fund Gender Reassignment

Under Obamacare insurance companies are being forced to pay for gender reassignment surgery. Now, Medicare is required to cover body vandalism because our government is incapable of distinguishing between legitimate health goals and dangerous delusions.

Medicare wouldn’t pay for my steroid injections if I thought 18 inch biceps were lurking just beneath the surface in my upper arms, so why should taxpayers be on the hook for this kind of surgery?

Male to female operations cost approximately $25,000 and the reverse female to male procedure quadruples that at $100,000.

Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist–in–chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “the transgendered suffer a disorder of ‘assumption’ like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa.”

Both are potentially reversible. Transgender surgery is not. Once Edward is emasculated he’ll never use a urinal again.

Dr. McHugh points out, “Policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention . . . the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken — it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

The Federalist.com details one grim outcome, “Another heart-wrenching story, of a female-to-male transgender, is that of Nancy Verhelst in Belgium. She was aghast after her surgery, saying she felt more like a ‘monster’ than a man. She also spoke of her sad childhood, in which her mother rejected her in favor of her brothers, and isolated little Nancy in a room over the garage. Nancy was so distraught that she asked doctors to put her to death under Belgium’s lax euthanasia laws. They coldly complied."

A 2011 study by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute studied the fate of 324 transgendered for up to 30 years after surgery, but it was tough keeping the numbers in the pool constant because a decade after the surgery the suicide rate was 20 times that of the normal population.

Two other studies, one at Vanderbilt and the other at the Portman Clinic in London, found that children who "felt trapped in the wrong body” “spontaneously lost feelings” 70 to 80 percent of the time. Unless they had the misfortune to encounter a school diversity counselor, at which point they were put on the nearest waiting list for surgery.

While Dr. McHugh was at Johns Hopkins, it was the first U.S. hospital to endorse reassignment surgery. It was also the first to stop doing the procedure because mental outcomes for patients were no better than for those that didn’t have the surgery.
The scalpel didn’t cut away the crazy.

Gender reassignment surgery is medical malpractice that perpetuates psychosis and is based on lies from similarly disturbed advocates.  There are unfortunates known as apotemnophiliacs who want surgery to amputate fully functioning limbs so they will feel whole. Ironically the same words those suffering from transgendered delusions use to justify their surgery. The medical–psychiatric industry here does not indulge those with that form of mental illness and neither do Democrats, so far.

Yet there is essentially no difference between the two syndromes with two exceptions — the culturally elite approved disorder involves sex—and taxpayers are forced to pay.

So far Uncle Sam isn’t paying for sex between consenting adults — other than the odd Secret Service agent in South America. He shouldn’t be paying for delusional sex surgery between confused adults.