Over the last decade, as activists started pushing colleges to accommodate transgender students, they first raised only basic issues, like recognizing a name change or deciding who could use which bathrooms.If private schools want their plans to offer this, that's their business. But the University of California system, which I subsidize with my tax dollars? Are you kidding me?
But the front lines have shifted fast, particularly at the nation's elite colleges, and a growing number are offering students health insurance plans with coverage for gender reassignment surgery.
No college or university offered such treatment just six years ago, but when Brown University said last week that its student health plan would be extended to cover sex-change surgery beginning in August, advocates for transgender students said Brown would become the 36th college to do so.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Should Universities Really Have Anything To Do With This?
My answer is "no":
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7 comments:
Once again, if we really want to honor merit over false divisions, what the heck does it matter if someone is transgendered, male, female or a dachshund? I am so tired of fake attributes and honors being given to people for something that has absolutely NOTHING to do with their ability to think, create or do their job. A good movie, painting or piece of music is not better nor worse because of the ethnicity, religion or gender preference of the creator. Please please please make it stop.
This is just disgusting. Not to mention, only think of the parents who might have no idea about their child's mental instability... only to find the poor kid's penis is irrevocably wacked off first semester of freshman year.
The ill-will and the lawsuits are probably not gonna be worth it.
At heart it's a nature/nurture debate.
If trans status is functionally assigned at birth or otherwise involuntary, then the occasional "misgendering" is a fairly straightforward medical condition like any other, be it psychological or physiological. In that case, denying it would be in the same class as denying other medical care, from cancer treatment to antidepressants to knee surgery. We don't have to provide free medical care for everyone, but we bear a moral responsibility to be honest about denials, and the results.
If trans status is voluntary, then we might not choose to accommodate it.
It certainly appears to be involuntary; therefore it's a medical condition. Do you have evidence otherwise?
Evidence otherwise is not the point, nice try at changing the subject.
Huh?
Look, you seem like someone who (like most folks) believes that they act in a moral way.
Morals allow you to decline to subsidize medical care: I'm not one of the "free unlimited medicine for everyone!" folks.
But here, you appear to be suggesting that trans stuff is in a different category than other things--after all, you're not GENERALLY complaining about health insurance plans; and you're not GENERALLY looking for changes in health insurance plans.
If you're focusing on trans issues to the exclusion of other stuff, then you have a moral requirement to explain it: either you don't think it's medical (in which case, why?) or you think it's medical but believe that it shouldn't be covered (in which case, why?)
I don't think I have a *moral* requirement to provide a reason, but whatever.
That surgery is elective. I shouldn't have to pay for your nose job, your boob job, or your !@#$ job.
The people in this video have problems, but why should I have to pay for them?
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/human-ken-doll
Their surgeries are elective, in a way that appendectomies are not.
If some dude wants to become a woman, have him take a sharp knife to the lesbian student club and let them take their whacks. Problem solved.
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