Even as a trans person with a supportive and financially comfortable family, I have probably spent >$60k of my own money on transgender healthcare in the past fifteen years. I work in tech, one of the most trans friendly industries, and my insurance didn't cover anything beyond gender reassignment surgery until the past two years because myself and some other queer basically bullied HR into doing it. The founders of our company on the Forbes list of billionaires and how rich they are is kind of a ha ha funny joke around the office, but the company was being stingy about trans healthcare.
As someone who started medical transition in 2009, I have some hilariously dark stories about navigating the healthcare system, but I've been very lucky to always have insurance and just kind of slip through the gates. When I was early on my transition, there happened to be one GP who was trans herself in the city I was in who basically told me all the ways I could navigate the healthcare system at the time. But even as a thirty something who transitioned fifteen years ago, I went to an older male endocrinologist in the NYU system a few years ago who started off my intake by asking "when did you first start feeling that you were in the wrong gender". I just started laughing.
A funny thing is to juxtapose this article with the current moral panic of trans teens getting hormones and surgeries that they will later regret. It's utterly fanciful that there are legions of trans teens getting healthcare that they will later regret simply because the material conditions of the United States do not allow such a thing. There would have to be sympathetic therapists as your interviewee mentioned, which are difficult and expensive to find for a minor. Basically no insurance covers trans healthcare for minors, so parents would have to pay out of pocket for any surgeries, which of course most can't, and parents would have to sign off on their kid getting surgeries, which of course most won't (this doesn't even start to address whether the demand is actually there for these treatments). The same is true in the UK but for different reasons: the NHS has been so thoroughly underfunded that wait times to even get in the door at a clinic, much less schedule a surgery date, takes several years: https://genderkit.org.uk/resources/wait-times/. Teenagers are no longer teenagers by the time they get through the system. I know it's predictable that reactionaries like Bari Weiss and her friends ignore material conditions and just fight culture wars but it's actually shocking how little the reality of trans healthcare has been mentioned.
And even for those tiny few that do end up regretting their transition: you know what they could have benefitted from? Better fucking mental healthcare!! Better funding for trans healthcare would mean that *fewer* people will go through transitions that they regret.
thanks for writing this Libby.
Even as a trans person with a supportive and financially comfortable family, I have probably spent >$60k of my own money on transgender healthcare in the past fifteen years. I work in tech, one of the most trans friendly industries, and my insurance didn't cover anything beyond gender reassignment surgery until the past two years because myself and some other queer basically bullied HR into doing it. The founders of our company on the Forbes list of billionaires and how rich they are is kind of a ha ha funny joke around the office, but the company was being stingy about trans healthcare.
As someone who started medical transition in 2009, I have some hilariously dark stories about navigating the healthcare system, but I've been very lucky to always have insurance and just kind of slip through the gates. When I was early on my transition, there happened to be one GP who was trans herself in the city I was in who basically told me all the ways I could navigate the healthcare system at the time. But even as a thirty something who transitioned fifteen years ago, I went to an older male endocrinologist in the NYU system a few years ago who started off my intake by asking "when did you first start feeling that you were in the wrong gender". I just started laughing.
A funny thing is to juxtapose this article with the current moral panic of trans teens getting hormones and surgeries that they will later regret. It's utterly fanciful that there are legions of trans teens getting healthcare that they will later regret simply because the material conditions of the United States do not allow such a thing. There would have to be sympathetic therapists as your interviewee mentioned, which are difficult and expensive to find for a minor. Basically no insurance covers trans healthcare for minors, so parents would have to pay out of pocket for any surgeries, which of course most can't, and parents would have to sign off on their kid getting surgeries, which of course most won't (this doesn't even start to address whether the demand is actually there for these treatments). The same is true in the UK but for different reasons: the NHS has been so thoroughly underfunded that wait times to even get in the door at a clinic, much less schedule a surgery date, takes several years: https://genderkit.org.uk/resources/wait-times/. Teenagers are no longer teenagers by the time they get through the system. I know it's predictable that reactionaries like Bari Weiss and her friends ignore material conditions and just fight culture wars but it's actually shocking how little the reality of trans healthcare has been mentioned.
And even for those tiny few that do end up regretting their transition: you know what they could have benefitted from? Better fucking mental healthcare!! Better funding for trans healthcare would mean that *fewer* people will go through transitions that they regret.