LGBT advocacy group Basic Rights Oregon is calling attention to a recent legal tweak in Oregon that will impact every transgender person in the state: Insurance companies in Oregon can’t deny medically necessary care for transgender people if it covers the same care for non-transgender people.
This seems like a strange loophole to have to sew up, but the Oregon state insurance division spelled out the law on its website. The 2007 legislative session passed a law banning discrimination based on gender identity and it has taken this long for that change to shake out into concrete action on the insurance front.
The new rules don’t guarantee coverage for gender reassignment surgery for people diagnosed with gender-identity disorder, as as Portland’s city insurance and a bunch of major companies’ insurance plans do. But if an insurance company covers something for other medical conditions—like, say hormone therapy for women with menopause or medically-necessary mastectomies—they have to offer that same coverage to people with gender-identity disorder.
There are no good numbers on how many insured, transgender people live in Oregon, but medical care for gender-identity issues is infamously costly. Puberty blockers for transgender teens, for example, cost $18,000 a year. Hopefully, parents of transgender kids growing up in Oregon won’t have to choose between paying for medical care or paying for college.
‘Puberty Blockers’ ?
Never heard of those before, but giving them to kids, regardless of whatever gender they believe they should be, sounds wrong on so many levels.
Well, frankieb, it is still common practice for parents/doctors to make ridiculous, radical (often irrevocable) surgical decisions to alter the organs of baby’s born intersexed (thus forcing a chosen a gender on the child)- but mention one word about something that puts the power in the hands of the person who would know best about their own gender identity, and all of a sudden we’ve got you up in arms…
Puberty-blockers would have saved me the humiliation of my chest being attacked by breasts, having to carry around two dangling masts for 20 years, and a surgical amputation procedure to have them removed (on top of sooooo much more that involves a lack of support, deep self-hatred, and an impeded will to live.)
God bless all the parents who support and love their LGBTQQI kids!!! Especially those of you who have kids who identify on the trans-spectrum or outside the standard duality of gender… The world has a lot of opinions- listen to your kids, listen to your hearts. They know who they feel they are meant to be!
And certainly children ain’t fickle and prone to change their mind about anything, right?
So dope ’em up.
Riiight…..
I edited this post today: Turns out Basic Rights Oregon referenced the ability to get medically-necessary mastectomies, not vasectomies, as I originally reported. Sorry about that.
Again, frankieb, if you’d learn your facts instead of just spewing smug and ignorant comments…
Puberty blockers/inhibitors are not dope- they DELAY/ INHIBIT/ BLOCK hormones, thus the onset of secondary sex characteristics. As such, the effects are REVERSABLE if or when someone was to “change their mind.”
I’ve put a handy little link below where you can find a bunch of fantastic information on the subject. It’s been reviewed and a-okay’ed by Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
http://transformingfamily.org/pdfs/Puberty…