MONTPELIER, Vermont, August 14, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Vermont parents will be able to take children of any age for “gender-reassignment” surgery at taxpayers’ expense if regulators adopt a proposed rule to abolish the state’s minimum age requirement for covering the procedure under Medicaid.
Proposed in May, the rule purports to expand access to “gender affirmation surgery” (including 16 genital-related surgeries as well as breast augmentation or removal) under Medicaid by eliminating the previous requirement that patients be at least 21 years old. Patients younger than 18 would need only provide “documented informed consent of a parent(s), legal custodian, or guardian.”
The Burlington Free Press reported that other conditions reduced or eliminated by the proposal include no longer needing hormone therapy for breast removal, reducing the hormone-therapy requirement for genital surgery from two years to one, and requiring evaluation from one mental health provider and one medical provider rather than requiring letters of support from two psychiatrists.
The public comment period for the proposal ended July 17. A final version of the rule will have to clear a Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules vote before taking effect.
Commenting on the proposal, Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute told OneNewsNow that the parental-consent requirement would be insufficient because “we know that parents are being influenced by the professional mental health and medical community,” whose “formal public statements endorse trans-affirming protocols.”
“We are going to look back on this in 10 (or) 20 years the way we look back on lobotomies for mentally ill people, because this is ghastly what we're doing to children,” she predicted.
Biological sex is rooted in an individual’s chromosomes and reflected by hundreds of genetic characteristics. Studies indicate that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, unless their confusion is reinforced by adults. Even reinforcing one’s chosen “gender identity” to the point of full sex-reassignment surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm.
The University of Cambridge’s Stonewall report found that 96 percent of trans students in Scotland attempted self-harm through actions such as cutting themselves, and 40 percent attempted suicide. Forty percent in the United States have attempted suicide, as well, according to a 2016 survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). According to a 2011 study from Sweden, trans people remain 19 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, even after surgery.