Is Berkeley Ready to Pay for Sex-Change Operations?

OK, Kalifoornia's budget is deeper in the shitter than Obama's, local governments are having to decide what services to cut to balance their budgets, a town in NJ is cutting back on cops and firefighters, Detroit is talking about closing half of their schools, but Berkeley is going to pay $20,000 towards an elective procedure.



My point here is not transgendered folks, so no sweat Nova. My point is that our governments are broke. They can't afford this.

What part of fiscal responsibility do these people not understand? How long until Kalifoornia asks for a bailout?

In the first place, ALL the best financial planners look at what you need and what you want. Guess what gets cut when the $$$ is missing?

"Ms. Slaby, why do you hate the transgendered so much?"

Of course, in a reasonable world, she's absolutely right. But we're talking about Berkeley.

If someone wants gender re-assignment, it is their responsibility to pay for it or find some help to achieve it.

Tax-payer funding of something like this is ludicrous...especially when the functions of government aren't even being properly funded in the first place.

I don't see why they don't just find an insurance provider that covers it if they are so worried about it - the difference in the premiums can't be THAT much and it's not like every third employee, even in Berkley, is gonna get in line.

In any case, my first instinct is - hell no, this isn't a priority in tough times, but my second reaction is - if the taxpayers will elect leaders who do think it's a good idea, then they can bloody well pay the taxes and move on. You get the leadership you deserve.

All that said, it is on the whole damned difficult to get any sort of TG treatment covered under most insurance when really, from a financial point of view it's not a huge money-pit. Lots of othered covered treatments cost far more than ~$20k

That needs to change, IMO.

Ha! The next class action against Cal's Dept. of Correction will be trannys asking for state funded sex changes. They already get hormone treatment (9th Cir.). Just wait, Berkeley will be the least of the problem.

Oh silly Tamar don't you know the purpose of government is to act as a goodie basket for everyone. Government exists to fulfill all your needs, wants, and desires. It says so in the Constitution (somewhere towards the back I think). All you have to do is figure out how to cash in. :smoking:

One of the tidbits that is permanently imprinted in my brain is a "Starlog" interview with Tim Curry, from when "Legend" came out. He talked about being in "Little Orphan Annie" and how he was in it because he believed it would be one of the last big-budget Hollywood musicals and he wanted to experience it. He described it as "like riding a mastodon to Hell."

In that context, and in a "Who is John Galt?" sort of way, I wholeheartedly endorse this initiative.

A person doesn't choose to be trans any more than they choose to be gay or they choose to have cancer. The best known 'cure' is to allow trans people to transition. Preventing them from doing so produces a higher death rate than even most cancers. It makes sense to include transition-related medical and psychological expenses in health insurance and to explicitly exclude them is just another manifestation of the mindless "ew, freak!" reaction.

By your example, the "cure" for cancer is to just let people die instead of fighting it.

not remotely.

In the former case, lake of treatment risks death as in the latter.

Question: Lots of people commit suicide because they can't accept what they are or what their circumstances are. Is it therefore a health-care issue to provide everyone with what they want because they might kill themselves if they don't get it?

Unless one wants to reason that way, the arguments just advanced do not have any particularly compelling validity.

I want liberals in chains, so I can ride them like ponies.

So, will Nova be moving to Berkely and trying for a city job??

When you're talking about a group of people who have a 50% suicide attempt rate and 31% eventually succeed, it warrants attention and serious thought. This isn't a simple matter of people just wanting something that most people think is silly.

Just like how a couple of years ago they found that children and teens given certain antidepressants were more likely to kill themselves, people didn't just throw up their hands and say, "They made their choice, the whiny little emos!"- people investigated and determined that the drugs were related to the deaths, even if they hadn't medically caused a rope to go around a neck or a trigger to be pulled. So now different treatments are given to young people and fewer parents are burying their children as a result of inadequate treatment.

No. We can give people counseling and put them on suicide watch if need be, but cosmetic surgery on the taxpayer's dime is un-fucking-acceptable.

^
That would probably cost way more than HRT and surgeries, and be far less effective.

Oh, bullshit. I'm not talking about two hours of daily therapy and a luxurious health spa retreat for observation. You're just trying to rationalize it. I'm not paying for boob jobs, and I'm not paying for vaginaplasty.

You hide the fallacy of your reasoning by talking about "groups" but "groups" rarely commit suicide. Individuals commit suicide. And when a person attempts suicide, that person has a 100% rate of attempting suicide. When a person actually kills himself, he has a 100% rate of having eventually succeeded.

If a 50/31 rate merits funding what the person wants so badly, shouldn't a 100/100 rate?

Hiding that by selecting a group of which the person is part is just playing with statistics. Any person who attempts or commits suicide can be classified as being part of a group with as high a rate as you say "warrants attention and serious thought" (in your earlier post, you were arguing that the sex-change operation should be paid for as a matter of healthcare, so you are really talking about more than "attention and serious thought") by selecting the group in just the right way.

Furthermore, do your statistics really correspond to those people, and only those people, who wanted the sex-change operation and didn't have it because they could not afford it, or do they correspond to a group that is defined differently? Unless they are only that group, the statistic is downright misleading.

What else can we extort from the taxpayers under threat of suicide? Can I get me some bionic implants? That would rock. Borg-ify me, or I'm pulling a Thelma & Louise into the Grand Canyon.

This isn't "playing with statistics". This is just looking at the very few statistics we have about trans people. And this is you pretending that grouping people by similar characteristics, e.g. |Trans people| |Young people on antidepressants| |People with epilepsy| isn't a valid and common way of collecting information and determining trends in those groups.

Well, then, do your statistics correspond to those people, and only those people, who want the sex-change operation but are not able to have it because of lack of money? If you claim it isn't "playing with statistics" then you should be able to give that kind of information. I know too much about statistics to let myself be persuaded by statistics that are just thrown out there, with no explanation about the conditions in which they were obtained.

Surely you're not so ignorant as to think that people commit suicide for one and only one discrete reason. Does that mean that you wait around until one manifests itself to do a complex study of a set of people to determine whether something needs reevaluation? Is there an exact percentage of young people on certain antidepressants who kill themselves that would mark your cutoff between 'sucks to be you, kid!' and 'maybe we should reconsider how we're treating this'? You are focusing far more on a statistic than I ever did and ignoring all the rest of my reasoning.

"Gays getting married?!! Does that mean I can marry a duck?"

I was not opening the door to all manner of fucktardedly invalid comparisons when I made my lame little joke. You disappoint me with this crap.

That's because it is the statistic that supposedly validates your reasoning.

I'm getting the distinct impression that you can't back it up.

And the point about a "group of one" is still valid as well. If a young girl is thinking about killing herself because she isn't beautiful, is it a health-care necessity to provide her with esthetic surgery to make her beautiful? If not, what makes a sex-change operation necessary health care but not that?

So we have a population of fruitloops that can't handle being what they are because something is broken in their noggin and try to kill themselves, hopefully before they breed. It's evolution in action. Defective adults don't pass on their genes and that particular defect isn't passed on.

Why are you against evolution?

It isn't the only thing that backs my reasoning. It's the only thing you're bothering to quibble about in lieu of actually addressing my reasoning. I only included that statistic to highlight the fact that this is a serious issue, not to prove my entire argument.

Then state your argument without the statistic.

This isn't a simple matter of people just wanting something that most people think is silly.


Just like how a couple of years ago they found that children and teens given certain antidepressants were more likely to kill themselves, people didn't just throw up their hands and say, "They made their choice, the whiny little emos!"- people investigated and determined that the drugs were related to the deaths, even if they hadn't medically caused a rope to go around a neck or a trigger to be pulled. So now different treatments are given to young people and fewer parents are burying their children as a result of inadequate treatment.