I don't understand how we can insist that these conditions are both the worst mental illnesses, and not mental illnesses at all, at the same time. And maybe you do understand, but it's not so clearly explained that people shouldn't be allowed to discuss it in public.
> though not any other group (e.g. religious people).
Is this made up?
Umm...We actually do pay for breast implants/breast reductions in the case of medical need which can vary from reconstruction to hormone imbalances, the latter of which makes sense to consider being transgender under since hormones do quite a bit to help with the illness.
What are your credentials, anyway? Why do you think you know more than decades of in depth research and millennia of anthropological evidence?
It's just the same for transgender people. Growing up feeling that you're in the wrong body can cause a lot of mental distress, and the best and most universally effective option for fixing that distress is to simply transition to living as another gender.
Not all people who are transgender experience severe enough dysphoria to cause serious mental health issues, and yet they still decide to transition and report being happier afterwards. [1] However, many transgender people do experience distress over it, and a proportion of that population are even suicidal over it.
This is why I consider it to be a cause of mental illness, not a mental illness in and of itself. And it's important to note that, even for the group that experience suicidality, transitioning is still an effective treatment. [2] [3]
Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is not even close to universally effective for people who are depressed about being "flat-chested" or "ugly." Cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancement has been shown to have a much, much higher rate of regret than transgender surgeries. [4]
In short, the reason that gender-affirming care is considered a treatment for gender dysphoria, whereas breast enhancement and rhinoplasty are not considered treatments for body dysmorphia, is simply that the former is effective and the latter is not.
1. https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-gender-i...
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10925986/
They have a whole media ecosystem, the actual main stream media, giving them training and talking points to subvert these conversations and successfully move away from facts.
They only follow the style of debate, not its substance.
Limiting your self to the substance only weighs you down against an attacker of this nature.
Engage, but just waste their cycles.
Eventually there is always a missing definition, something extremely basic that’s being alluded to. Or a contradiction that shows up.
Point that out and you will get the “go google it yourself”, retreat flag show up.
Do you think pro-natalist policies (anything that can be seen as incentivizing the act of having more children) need to come from a desire to see more equality, or human dignity?
In fact some of the most evil people of the 1900s thought it was good to support the medical costs of pregnancy, and even thought you should /pay families if they had more children to incentivize having more/ (see pro natalist politics in Western Europe in 30s, 40s, 50s. The ones in my country, France, actually had their strongest push in 1939, and are a large part of the reason why France's baby boom was one of the strongest in Europe later on).
You will find out that people who usually hate social programs will have different opinions about anything related to demographics, and it's not complicated to understand why (whether their motives come from racism, or selfishness ie a desire to preserve the GDP and make sure the country won't be an empty hell hole of old people dying in the hospice when they retire).
He doesnt need credentials. No one needs credentials to be correct, their statements should be evaluated on their merits alone. Credentialism is a choking ideology, leading to higher prices and possibly higher quality in many things.
Having studied or lived through something makes you far more likely to be correct than simply thinking about it with your giant brain. You don't need them to be correct, but they really help.
Uh insurance actually does cover them, particularly for reconstructive surgeries. It should be noted that the conditions under which insurance would cover a trans person's gender affirming surgery is going to be essentially under the same conditions they would for a cis person. Now it's worth noting that Medicaid does generally cover gender affirming surgeries in certain states however Medicaid is required to be primarily paid for by the state rather than the federal government. Medicare only covers them under specific circumstances with a large pile of supporting documentation attached. And then with private insurance providers it is highly dependent on the company and policy whether they cover them or not.
> We're also not labeling it as "life-saving."
Gender affirming surgeries are almost always the very last step for trans people and it's far quicker, easier, and more common to get them as a cis person than it is as a trans person.
Gender affirming care however is generally what is referred to as life-saving more than anything else. This is primarily access to medication in the form of Hormone Replacement Therapy and additionally in the form of access to counseling and therapy to support the transition and to mitigate gender dysphoria among other issues.
And the thing I think most people don't really understand is how disgustingly cheap the primary form of care, Hormone Replacement Therapy, is.
For trans women the main medication is estradiol. This medication is extremely cheap and most pharmacies won't take insurance for it due to how cheap it is. A month's dose in the cheapest form at one of the higher doses is going to be at most 15-20 USD per month. More expensive forms of estradiol that don't have to be taken as rigorously and/or have less risk of side effects cost around 1.5-3x that depending on the form. For the first few months to a year they'll also generally take a testosterone suppressor until the estradiol suppresses testosterone by itself and those medications only cost around 10 USD per month or less.
For trans men the main medication is testosterone. It's controlled so it's more annoying to get due to it's abuse as a "performance enhancing drug" but even at the higher doses it costs more or less the same amount or less than the equivalent doses of HRT for trans women (coming in at well under 20 USD/month, more often less than 5 USD/month).
This puts the cost of the bulk of treatment for transgender people at well under the cost of most other medications.