Transgender adults in Florida are blindsided that a new law also limits their access to health care
apnews.com
The new law that bans gender-affirming care for minors also mandates that adult patients seeking trans health care sign an informed consent form. It also requires a physician to oversee any health care related to transitioning, and for people to see that doctor in person. Those rules have proven particularly onerous because many people received care from nurse practitioners and used telehealth. The law also made it a crime to violate the new requirements.
Another new law that allows doctors and pharmacists to refuse to treat transgender people further limits their options.
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ok, so sign the paperwork. what's the problem?
and there's nothing wrong with allowing medical practitioners to choose what cases they want to work on - it's no different from a surgeon picking what surgeries they perform. being prescribed hormones isnt even a "life saving" medical issue... it's more along the lines of cosmetic surgery (liposuction, plastic surgery, etc).
I sincerely hope you never have an event in your life where a doctor decides they don't want to work on your case anymore. It's happened to me. I have a chronic and very painful nerve disorder and I had a doctor tell me they couldn't help me anymore. Now in that case, it was fair, because he was just out of ideas and thought I could get better care in a bigger city. But imagine if this doctor had just said, "I don't feel like helping your kind." Imagine if I was bleeding out and the doctor felt that way.
It is absolutely wrong, and unethical, for a doctor to refuse to treat a sick person without very good reason. And "I have a moral objection" is not a very good reason.
Imagine being unable to go to a doctor near you and instead having to travel 40 miles to get to a doctor who is willing to care for you, or not being able to go a doctor your insurance covers purely due to legalized discrimination (especially legalized discrimination that was once illegal!)
The goal of explicitly allowing discrimination against a particular minority (especially in healthcare) is to retarn to the Jim Crowe era where the members of the minority group is limited to only being able to access inferior services, greatly reducing the quality and longevity of their lives
Suicide rates of folks who want to transition but are denied care are scary high.
Hormone replacement therapy (which by the way is reserved for adults and only after extensive, typically years-long consultation. Minors will receive puberty blockers to delay puberty until they are old enough to make an informed decision on how they wish to proceed) is not cosmetic but flat out is a large part of the physical transition that trans people go through
Note: I'm going off of memory from discussions with trans friends, anyone with more experience related to the transitioning process please feel free to correct me on the specifics
I am really tired of this argument that trans health care is "just cosmetic".
When I walk out of my house every day how I read as male, female or something in between will color my every interaction with every stranger I meet. It also impacts how safe and confident we feel existing in public space. If people can "clock" someone is trans your entire experience changes. If you do not visually conform to the gender stated on your legal documents your world gets smaller. You cannot travel without potentially getting detained, searched or interrogated and some places you can't travel at all. You might be passed over as a perspective renter, refused service somewhere you need due to someone's "moral objections". Never mind how everyone will misgender you.
When you don't pass the world is a different place. People stare at you more, scrutinize you more, treat you with kid gloves or like you are mentally ill. They find it more acceptable to ask you questions about shit that really isn't their business. People who think people like you shouldn't exist can spot you at a distance and are more likely to stalk you to less populated secondary locations. People are more likely to harass you in general and the experience of just being legitimately considered "ugly" can ruin your self esteem because the overwhelming reaction you get from people is that they wish they didn't have to experience you. Then when you get home and look yourself in the mirror all of that compounds to the vision of yourself as a being who does not deserve kindness. That yes, you are ugly, incomplete and you never will be real enough but there's no going back because this is still better than where you came from. That this might be the best it will ever getand you just have to live with it.
To render that down to "it's all just cosmetic" is to ignore the entire politics of sex, gender and how transphobia shapes one's experiences. You may not think gender colors your experience but that is because you can take it for granted. That's part of the cis experience. That is an advantage that trans people do not have. We do not have the advantage or capability of not caring. We can try to ignore our needs but they are still needs. Ignored those unmet needs just become depression, anxiety, a pervasive sense that nobody knows you (just a fake version of you that is performed for their acceptance) , a deep loneliness and sense of being invisible.
It's is a good recipe for making dying a lot more attractive then having to keep up the facade of living.