GLAAD - Healthcare for all - Give trans people access (2014) 2:00 (USA)

This choddy produced by GLAAD and The Sylvia Law Project is your usual talking heads edit, except with poor sound, terrible reading off cue cards and no color correction at all. Oh, and it stars a celebrity... Sort of. That young kid who looks like the spitting image of a young Annette Bening is the eldest child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Stephen Ira Beatty. Stephen was born Kathlyn Elizabeth and has three younger siblings, but Stephen's lines in the choddy make no mention of celebrity parents. "I grew up outside New York, but I've always known I've wanted to move here for the city's vibrant artistic community." then Stephen explains: "As a trans person, I would hope that I'd be welcomed but many trans people aren't because we don't have the basic healthcare coverage we need to survive." Now, forgive me for not being all updated on how the US system works, but wasn't Obamacare meant to give affordable health care access to everyone? Medicaid is the health programme for families and individuals with low income and resources. This choddy explains that New York State Medicaid "excludes transgender people from accessing care".

Client: GLAAD and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project

Adland® is supported by your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi coffee.
Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 1 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
Owen Wills's picture

Medical care that many trans people need, such as hormones and surgery, are not universally covered. Identical procedure are covered for cisgender people, however.

James Trickery's picture

That doesn't parse. If the procedure and treatment is identical, it should be thus be covered. Or it's not "identical".

Owen Wills's picture

It isn't covered if it is in any way related to gender identity, although surgeries to alter 'amiguous genitalia' can be covered for intersex people. The ban was put in place based on older studies done in the 1970s, which labeled surgeries and hormone therapy for transgender people as experimental. When Medicare reconsidered their ban last year, they weren't able to justify keeping it because hormone therapy and surgery have long been proven effective for many trans people.

James Trickery's picture

That's why the comment didn't parse. "Intersex people" have an abnormal physical condition. Surgically mending hermaphroditism is like surgically mending a cleft lip or cleft palate and similar oral malformations, and not comparable to surgically altering non-abnormal genitalia. That's like saying you want a free rhinoplasty because people with a deviated septum can get insurance help to fix their nose breathing issues.

Andreas-Udd's picture

So, @Owen So, intersex (which is a variety of conditions that include deformities and sometimes more than one set of gonads) people have on Medicaid the ability to get certain help such as altering deformed/oddly developed or ambiguous genitalia and/or removing the extra set of gonads.... But people born in perfectly healthy bodies to not have the right to Medicaid paid access to these same surgeries... and that's bad, why, exactly? They don't have the same issues, one person has birth defects that can be surgically helped, the other person has a fully functioning body without defects.