While We Are Talking Healthcare

This is something that we all know in the trans community but it is something not many other people know or understand.

Health care is new front for transgender rights under Trump
Chicago Tribune
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar  Associated Press
April 29, 2018

Military service. Bathroom use. Job bias. And now, health care.

The Trump administration is coming under fire for rewriting a federal rule that bars discrimination in health care based on "gender identity." Critics say it's another attempt to undercut acceptance for transgender people.


The Health and Human Services Department rule dates to the Obama administration, a time when LGBT people gained political and social recognition. But a federal judge in Texas said the rule went too far by concluding that discrimination on the basis of gender identity is a form of sex discrimination, which is forbidden by civil rights laws.

Instead of appealing the judge's injunction, the Trump administration has opted to rewrite the rule, which applies to health care providers and insurers receiving federal funds.

Roger Severino, head of the department's Office for Civil Rights, said the rewrite will address the "reasonableness, necessity and efficacy" of the Obama-era requirement. He refused to discuss specifics, as the revision is under White House review before its official release.

In other words they are going to dump us… they are going to find that healthcare for us is not "reasonableness, necessity and efficacy" and they are probably also have some type of “religious freedom” exemption. But I see a long drawn out court battle, which is why I hope Supreme Court Justice Kennedy stays on until 2020 election.

They are also going to find it hard to prove "reasonableness, necessity and efficacy" when…

Gender-affirming surgery 'significantly improves quality of life,' study says
Approximately 75 percent of transgender women showed an improved quality of life after surgery, a study out of Germany found.
NBC News
By Vanessa Guillen Matheus
April 11, 2018

Before her surgery, Sydney Walther, 21, said she had been terrified of going out in public and being stared at by unknown faces. But today, she said those fears have dissipated, and it’s “as if a weight has been lifted” off her shoulders.

The Virginia resident traveled to New York City last year for what she described as a “life-changing,” gender-affirmation surgery at NYU Langone Health.
[…]
A team at University Hospital in Essen, Germany, followed 158 transgender women patients for a median of more than six years after their surgery. They found approximately 75 percent of patients showed improved quality of life after their procedure. The results were unveiled last month at the annual European Association of Urology Conference in Copenhagen.

“It’s very important that we have good data on quality of life (QOL) in transgender people,” Dr. Jochen Hess, the study’s lead author, told NBC News. “They generally suffer from a worse QOL than non-transgender population, with higher rates of stress and mental illness, so it’s good that surgery can change this, but also that we can now show that it has a positive effect.”
[…]
Dr. Hess hopes his team’s study and the new Essen Transgender Quality of Life Inventory will help transgender individuals and health professionals make better and more informed decisions regarding transgender care.

It will also make it harder to take away our healthcare when the studies show that our the quality of our lives improve immensely by transitioning and not hiding in the close.

It will make the religious bias of the current administration has against us.

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I am having minor dental surgery so my posts will be sporadic, yesterday after the Novocain wears off I feel like I got hit by a truck. My next appointment is in two weeks and I just hope it doesn’t hurt like it does now for two weeks.