We won… but it is all on the verge of being taken away by these so call “religious freedom” laws and the fear is coming back. What will happen if we are rushed to an emergency room only to be told “we don’t want your kind here!”
As Health and Human Services start their department of religious bigotry we are going to all going to be tainted with apprehension as we seek medical treatment.
If you remember that under President Obama’s administration they required every hospital that accepted federal Medicare or other federal funding to allow same-sex couples to have visitation rights for their spouses, well the same can apply in reverse.
It’s ‘Scary,’ But Transgender Patients Are Fighting Trump’s Health-Care Discrimination AgendaNow and for the rest of her life Stefi is going to have a tinge of fear and anxiety when she goes to a hospital or a doctor’s office.
If the Trump administration gets its way, doctors will be able to claim a religious or a more nebulous moral objection as an excuse to deny care, gender-affirming or otherwise, to transgender patients.
Rewire
By Christine Grimaldi
March 13, 2018
Stefi Honey had been with her primary care doctor for five years, visiting as often as every other week without incident. When she began to live openly as a transgender woman, however, the doctor-patient dynamic changed.
Honey’s doctor eyed her dresses and asked if she was “gay,” though sexual orientation and gender identity are not one and the same. The doctor “wasn’t very gentle in the way she was speaking about it,” Honey, 57, recalled in an interview with Rewire.News. Neither were the nurses and office staff. She watched their “giggles” and “snickers” via a door window into the waiting room.
[…]
“She looked at me, and then she kind of hemmed and hawed and kind of got this stupid grin on her face, and she said, ‘Well, I just don’t believe in that, and I can’t help you with that,’” Honey said. “I cried. I cried.”
As Health and Human Services start their department of religious bigotry we are going to all going to be tainted with apprehension as we seek medical treatment.
“What if a doctor wouldn’t put a cast on your broken arm because you’re transgender?” the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) asked in a video recapping various forms of discrimination that could have the administration’s blessing. “These situations aren’t hypothetical—this is what happens when a persons’ care comes second to their doctor’s religious or moral beliefs,” the NWLC explained in an accompanying tweet.Well we don’t have to worry about that here; we have non-discrimination laws in this state… wrong!
Even hospitals could turn away transgender patients. Catholic hospitals, which operate under religious directives that have been used to deny care, account for one in six acute-care beds nationwide.
The Trump administration is angling to give a giant out to the entire medical profession in the name of “religious freedom,” or religious imposition.
If you remember that under President Obama’s administration they required every hospital that accepted federal Medicare or other federal funding to allow same-sex couples to have visitation rights for their spouses, well the same can apply in reverse.
The proposed regulations are open for public comment through March 27. Commenting allows advocacy groups and concerned members of the public alike to register their discontent and lay the groundwork for legal challenges, though HHS previously tried and failed to hide negative comments about anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ policy.The thing is these fears are going to come to fruition unless we act!
The National LGBTQ Task Force is collecting comments on the health department’s proposed regulations via an online portal. So is the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). “We strongly encourage you to use your own words, including by sharing personal stories of how discrimination or the fear of discrimination in health care or related services has affected you or someone you love, or why you oppose this rule as a person of faith,” NCTE wrote in its appeal. Some of those stories are already circulating on Twitter under the hashtags #RxforDiscrimination, #LicensetoDiscriminate, and #PutPatientsFirst.
[…]
NCTE Director of Policy Harper Jean Tobin said that speaking up can take many forms, whether that’s “going and complaining to the administration of a hospital about the way you were treated by a provider,” or talking to the press, or fighting in the courts.
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