Transgenders are people who identify with a gender other than their biological sex that, according to transgenders, they were “assigned” at birth.
The cover for the June 9, 2014 issue of Time magazine, sporting a pic of transgender “Orange Is the New Black” actor Laverne Cox, proclaims:
The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier
When I first saw the Time cover, I was quite baffled. Don’t transgenders in the United States already have the same civil rights as the rest of us? What civil rights are denied to transgenders? Are they excluded from the guarantees and protections of the U.S. Constitution?
How naïve of me.
In her Time cover story, Katy Steinmetz writes that transgenders “are emerging from the margins to fight for an equal place in society” and that “trans people live in a world largely built on a fixed and binary definition of gender. In many places, they are unwelcome in the men’s bathroom and the women’s. The effect is a constant reminder that they don’t belong.”
Blah. Blah. Blah.
It turns out transgenders’ “next civil rights frontier” is all about money, i.e., money from your pocket into theirs.
On May 30, 2014, Obama the POS ended a 33-year ban on Medicare coverage for gender reassignment surgery.
Washington Post reporter Ariana Cha calls the lifting of the 1981 ban “a major victory for transgender rights and a decision that is likely to put pressure on more insurers to provide coverage for such services.”
Gosh, silly me! I never knew it’s a civil “right” not only to have a “gender reassignment” surgery, but to have other people pay for chopping off one’s penis and gouging out a wound as a pretend vagina.
The May 30 ruling by a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) board was in response to a lawsuit filed last year by the ACLU, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, on behalf of Denee Mallon, 74, a transgender woman and army veteran from Albuquerque.
Obama administration officials originally had sought to overturn the ban in 2013, but the attempt prompted a backlash among social conservatives and religious groups who oppose taxpayer funding for such procedures. Now, HHS says medical studies published over the past three decades showed that the grounds for exclusion of coverage are “not reasonable” anymore and lifted the ban.
Although Medicare coverage is only for people 65 and older, and the transgender population makes up only about 0.3% of the U.S. adult population, private insurance plans often take their cues from Medicare on what should be considered a medically necessary covered treatment. As a result, the ruling is likely to open up more options for transgender individuals.
The ruling does not (yet) apply to Medicaid, the health program administered by states for low-income individuals and families.
Even before the federal government’s lifting of the ban, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon and Vermont already affirmed the idea that transition care for transgender individuals should be considered an essential part of medical coverage. In February, D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said the city would recognize gender dysphoria as a medical condition — effectively forcing insurers to cover gender-reassignment surgery.
Jamison Green, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a nonprofit “educational” group that works with doctors, said that while the March 30th ruling was a step in the right direction in ending discrimination in insurance coverage, there is still more work to be done. He explained, for example, that some transgender men have had trouble getting coverage for mammograms or hysterectomies when they developed fibroids or even cancer.
All of which means the cost of the “gender reassignment” surgery is just the beginning because of a myriad of post-surgery “upkeep,” like life-time hormonal treatments that, no doubt, will also be paid for by Medicare and private medical insurers.
Remember this pic for FOTM’s 73rd Caption Contest?
Seated on the right is the transgender named Amanda Lepore. Born Armand Lepore and genetically a male, 46-year-old Lepore is a transgender model, “nightlife and fashion icon, performance artist and recording artist.”
Lepore said “her” sex change from male to female at age 19 was the most painful procedure “she’s” had done: “It didn’t hurt when I got it done at the hospital. But they give you a dilator as part of the healing process, which you have to keep in for extended periods of time to stretch the vaginal opening. It felt like a knife. It was the most painful thing I had ever experienced.”
In an interview with a fawning reporter for the online magazine XoJane, one of the top 10 “lifestyle” websites for women, Lepore enumerated her post-op upkeep, including:
- “Perpetual hormones”.
- Three breast augmentations “over the years” to acquire “that Jessica Rabbit thing.”
- Buttock implants.
- Getting her bottom ribs broken for a smaller waist.
- Dermatology with a dermatologist/plastic surgeon uptown named Dr. Warfel.
- Rophynol “once in a while” because it’s “painful to have sex.” Rophynol, popularly known as a date rape drug, is a powerful benzodiazepine, ± 10-fold more potent than Valium, which is illegal in the US but is used elsewhere as a hypnotic and in anesthesia. Lepore explains [Language Warning!]: “I wasn’t a pig or anything where I would be fucking every five minutes, but once in a while there would be a guy that I couldn’t resist — and I would take a rohypnol and it would work! But since then I’ve learned to dilate and stretch my pussy and I know how to have really good sex. Oh yeah. Premarin vaginal cream. It’s a whole process. Like I said, it was really painful for me to have sex, especially if the guy was really well endowed, so a transsexual friend of mine said that when you get up in the morning, use a numbing cream and then put a small dildo in your pussy in a girdle! And then have breakfast and clean your house and whatever, and then you stretch it with a bigger one and then use Premarin vaginal cream. This all makes the pussy walls stretch like a natural woman’s.”
Beneath the façade, the life of a post-op transgender is a life of ingesting never-ending very-powerful hormones and painkillers, the side effects of which are not publicized.
And although the surgery is called “gender reassignment,” in truth the surgery does no such thing. After all the torturous body mutilations — excising the penis or breasts; gouging a pretend-vagina that must be “dilated” until the wound eventually scars over; shaving off the Adam’s Apple — the transgender’s body is still genetically and chromosomally what God had made.
That is why psychiatrist Joseph Berger, M.D., board certified as a specialist by both the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, has stated there is no scientific basis for transgender.
In a statement against the Canadian federal government’s Bill C-279 (popularly known as the “bathroom bill”) giving special protection to transgenders, Dr. Berger stated that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a “transgendered” person, and that terms such as “gender expression” and “gender identity” used in the bill are at the very least ambiguous, and are more an emotional appeal than a statement of objective scientific fact.
“I have read the brief put forward by those advocating special rights, and I find nothing of scientific value in it,” Dr. Berger said in his statement. “Words and phrases, such as ‘the inner space,’ are used that have no objective scientific basis. There seems to me to be no medical or scientific reason to grant any special rights or considerations to people who are unhappy with the sex they were born into, or to people who wish to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex. The so-called ‘confusion’ about their sexuality that a teenager or adult has is purely psychological. As a psychiatrist, I see no reason for people who identify themselves in these ways to have any rights or privileges different from everyone else in Canada.”
In other words, transgenderism is a psychological, not biological, disorder, which would explain why gender dysphoria fluctuates over time.
Toronto specialist Ken Zucker, who opposes the use of sex change therapies, claims that only about 12% of boys and girls with gender dysphoria will still have persistent dysphoria as adults.
This fact alone should lead even the most committed supporters of early intervention to err strongly on the side of caution.
H/t FOTM’s Lola
~Eowyn