SALEM, Oregon (LifeSiteNews) — The Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services (DCBS) proposed requiring insurance companies to cover surgical and chemical gender “transition” treatments, including for minors, citing a set of “health” guidelines designed in part to manipulate insurers into complying with the trans agenda.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that DCBS’s proposed rule applies to both private and public insurers and further requires insurers to ensure they are contracted with enough gender doctors to keep waits for “care” timely and undergo training to “demonstrate their experience with gender-affirming treatment.” Failure to comply could result in loss of their insurance licenses. Treatments to reverse transitions that a patient has come to regret would not have to be covered.
The rule is slated to take effect in January 2025. While other states have similar mandates, Oregon would be the first to expressly base them on the judgment of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which calls sex changes “medically necessary.”
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, a lawsuit over Alabama’s ban on “transitioning” gender-confused minors led to the discovery of emails indicating that WPATH’s labeling of transitions as “medically necessary” was seen as a “tool” to pressure insurance companies to cover them rather than as an objective medical conclusion.
“We needed a tool for our attorneys to use in defending access to care (i.e., ‘sex changes’),” one official wrote in January 2022. “The original Medical Necessity Statement was specific to the U.S. because this was where we were experiencing the problem (…) I have long wanted this (and many of our other policy statements) to become part of the (standards of care) because that gives them greater force.”
Further, despite public insistence that WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC-8) was formed with the “most rigorous protocol in the world,” the emails show that WPATH refused to publish the findings of Johns Hopkins researchers who concluded there was “little to no evidence” supporting WPATH’s desired conclusion.
“It is paramount that any publication based on the WPATH SOC8 data is thoroughly scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender healthcare (sic) in the broadest sense,” another email read.
Previous disclosures from the same lawsuit revealed that cross-dressing Biden administration assistant Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Richard “Rachel” Levine “strongly pressured WPATH leadership to rush the development and issuance of SOC-8, in order to assist with Administration political strategy,” specifically by pushing for the elimination of minimum-age guidelines.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
Oregon is a self-declared “refugee state” for gender-confused individuals, including minors, to get procedures that might be restricted in their home states. Last year, the state Department of Education instructed teachers to withhold knowledge that a student is suffering gender dysphoria from parents as part of an updated guidance on “supporting gender expansive students.” Not to be outdone, its prison system houses violent male convicts who claim transgender status with actual female inmates.