Transgenderism and ObamaCare



August 10, 2009

By Bryan Fischer Autumn Sandeen (who is biologically a male in every cell of his body despite adopting a female name) writes atthat it's all hokum that sex reconstructive surgery could wind up being mandated by ObamaCare, all in an effort to contradict Matt Barber's assertion that it almost certainly will. But as Peter LaBarbera has pointed out, the leftist Center for American Progress is already lobbying to ensure that the president explicitly adds "sex change operations to the list of medical procedures that all health insurance policies in the nation must cover."In Idaho, a judge last week ordered taxpayers in the Gem State to pay for sex change hormone therapy for two inmates, even though the medical doctors and mental health professionals who evaluated these inmates concluded they were not in fact suffering from gender identity disorder.But no matter to this arrogant, tyrannical judge who imposed his own medical and psychiatric judgment on Idaho taxpayers despite having not a single, solitary credential in either field. Note the significance of this ruling for the current debate over ObamaCare: this took place in a single-payer, government-run health care system, which all prisons utilize.Note too that this judge give himself complete liberty to decide what procedures will and will not be covered under government run health care. Elected officials and taxpayers don't want it in there? Fuhgedaboutit.In this judge's magical world, such policy decisions are no longer for elected officials, medical professionals, mental health care professionals, or even government bureaucrats to make. Nope, says the judge, I get to decide what medical procedures poor benighted Idaho citizens have to subsidize whether it offends their moral sensibilities or not.Now it's obviously a very short jump from hormone therapy to surgery. The difference is a matter of degree, not kind. This gap can be bridged by an activist judge in a legal nanosecond without breaking a sweat in his black robe.Sandeen goes on unwittingly to defeat his argument in two ways by calculating the cost per American to have gender reconstructive surgery included in ObamaCare. Okay, if there's no chance it's going to be in there, why is he working so hard to convince us how cheap it will be? Sounds like he's drumming up an argument to me.He calculates that the cost, spread out over the entire population of the U.S., would only be about $1.73 per person per year. This is a self-defeating line of reasoning. If that's all it costs, why there should be plenty of compassionate, gay-friendly Americans who would happily pony up contributions to a charitable organization created to dispense vouchers to psychologically confused Americans who want to surgically mutilate themselves.There is simply no reason to force American taxpayers who find such a procedure morally objectionable to subsidize this deviancy with their tax dollars. According to an article in last week's Boston Globe, the attempted suicide rate among transgendered individuals is many times higher than among the heterosexual population, certainly a reflection that the inner dissonance they live with is terribly self-destructive.If any tax dollars are to be spent on transgenderism at all, they should be spent on reparative therapy, helping these tortured individuals reconcile their psychological identity with their biological identity. True compassion, after all, liberates. It does not enable.© Bryan Fischer