But why does gender dyphoria get "special" treatment besides the obvious lobbying? Body dysmorphic disorder is also a recognized and diagnosed mental illness, so wouldn't having the taxpayers pay for liposuction, synthahol injections, gastric bypass, etc. also be warranted under that rationale? I'm sure that those procedures wouldn't "feel elective" to the people suffering from them, either...
I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to have the procedure; just that we shouldn't be forcing an already broke government to use our money to pay for it.
Please point to all the lobbying done. I won't go so far as to say there is not lobbying, but the "lobbying" being done is next to nothing compared to what lobbying goes on in Washington. Look at Comcast and net neutrality among others. There might be a few hundred thousand a year spent for transgender issues, but orders of magnitude more spent on just about anything else.
At one time being gay was also considered a "psychological disorder." And to many it still is viewed as one. That doesn't mean it actually is a "disorder." Biological sex and gender identity are not the same thing, and cause major issues for people who have a mis-match between them. Transgendered individuals have some of the highest suicide rates out there (
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/ja...uicide-attempts-alarming-transgender-20140127).
If SRS helps them, then we as a society should help with that. Besides, there are bigger issues to fight over. And by the logic presented in this thread by many people, Medicare/Medicaid should not pay to treat people who have diseases from smoking. But we do. And that's a massively larger group than people with gender issues. So if you want to make the argument that "if people choose to change genders, that's fine as long as I don't pay for it" then how can you hold the position that "a person who chose to smoke all their life and now has lung cancer I want to pay for their treatment"? It's ok for you to pay for one group who made an active choice to smoke their whole life (many who knew the risks), but not ok to pay for somebody who was born with the psyche of one gender and a body of the other to get their body to match their psyche?
It may not be the pc opinion to have, but I don't think that our tax dollars should be paying for this. I know that psychologist study this and think they have it all worked out, it's a perfectly normal thing etc. I disagree, however, and think that gender dyphoria or whatever term you want to use to call it is a mental disease. If they want to pay for it, fine, but our tax dollars shouldn't be what pays for it.
Side rant I don't know how the "T" got in the mix with "LGB", and if I were one of the first three I would not want to be associated with the latter. They are completely different things imo. I think the whole notion of gender fluidity is absurd and if I were LGB and wanted to be taken seriously I wouldn't include the T (since sexual preference is completely different than someone wanting to be a gender that they are not).
You can hold your personal views, and I fully support you holding whatever views you want. However when your views harms others I take issue.
The T part is kind of the odd one out in LGBT. The LG part has made a lot of strides in getting equality, although still not there in the US. The B part gets ostracized from the LG and heterosexual communities (many people don't see how a person could be attracted to both sexes). The T part is the one that really is lacking in progress. They have made some progress, but nothing like the LG side of it has. And they, like bisexuals, get ostracized from both LG and hetero communities.
To me this is too small an issue to get indignant about.
I used to be very wary of the validity of sexual reassignment surgery - to me it seemed like self-mutilation in indulgence of a mental illness, not a legitimate medical therapy. Since that time, though, I got to know and became friends with a female-to-male transsexual (he is actually married to my ex-GF's best friend). It took essentially no time to be convinced that he really is a man, and was one even when he was entirely female in appearance. I don't know how common this kind of gender dysphoria is, but it's a real phenomenon and honestly as long as there is adequate screening prior to any surgery or medical treatments, I have no problem with gender reassignment or being obligated to pay, through Medicare, for the vanishingly small number of Medicare-eligible people who undergo gender reassignment procedures.
:thumbsup:x1000.