Alas it appears that I have offended the comic book gang.

 Yes folks in my innocent proposal to speed the process and save taxpayer’s dollars on sex-change procedures, I appear to have raised the ire of the comic book crowd in Canada

 I guess I can see how transexuals and comic book folks can relate to each other to a degree.

 Both are sub-cultures that are often the target of some ribbing. Both have terribly limited themselves in their choice of sexual partners. Both are often prone to some rather less than fashionable choices of dressing. Both are prone to living in their parent’s basements well into adulthood. While transsexuals often can be found wearing thongs, comic book folks have often suffered wedgies thus can relate to posterior pressure.

 These commonalities clearly have led to some empathy between these groups thus I should not be too terribly surprised that in offending one, I have offended another.

 I see the fellow who has taken issue with me has fallen back on the usual bigot accusation among the rest of his profanity laden rant. Ahh well, tis the usual tactic of those with no case. An irony in that is the abuse I took in the past with my open support of same sex marriages from conservatives who are usually of similar mindset to me. While we often debated heatedly, I never had to lower myself to the near-Godwin type of cop out of the accusations of bigotry.

 As stated before, I could not care less what transexuals (or comic book geeks) want to do with themselves. They have every right to pursue whatever makes them happy. 

 A line gets crossed when one is asking me as a taxpayer to fund their pursuits however. I do not and never will support public funding for surgery that simply is not medically required.  I fear the comic book gang may have themselves declared an identifiable group and then pursue liposuction and bicep implants with my taxdollars.  The comic book folks would be well advised to thicken their skins rather than their waistlines if indeed they want to be taken more seriously.

 Either way, I still have not had any applications for my garage procedure though I am keeping my fingers crossed. I believe in recycling and do indeed have a needle and thread. I will be able to do the woman to man thing shortly upon treating my first man to woman patient.

 

30 thoughts on “Alas it appears that I have offended the comic book gang.

  1. This confuses me. MGK did have the figure that there are on average 8-10 surgeries done each year, and that at $20,000 per surgery, this costs the Ontario budget roughly 0.00006% of the annual health care budget. I’m not a Canadian, and I don’t know how much you end up paying each year to the government in health care.

    Let’s assume you end up paying $5,000 annually for health care out of pocket. If that’s true, you end up spending $0.03 of your annual $5000 on sexual re-assignment surgery for others. Even if this opens the floodgates and the number of sexual reassignment surgeries multiplies a hundredfold, that’s still $0.30 out of $5,000.

    Have you ever dropped a penny on the floor and not picked it up? Or seen a penny on the ground and not grabbed it? If you bother to do that a couple of times a year, you’ve recovered how much you spent on health care for sexual reassignment surgery.

  2. As diddums. Did the nasty big kids disagree with oos opinions? There, there. No, take your thumb out. A nice warm glass of milk is what you need, young man, and then straight up to bed! Don’t want you to get tired out, now do we?

  3. I don’t know about anyone else here, but I am really enjoying Cory’s “this guy only has ad hominem attacks” rhetoric, prefaced by a few paragraphs (and a still from the Simpsons! Who didn’t see THAT one coming!) of pure stereotyping. Good times.

  4. Yeah, the ‘comic book gang’. Way to ignore the fact that the author is a law student and a senior editor of his school’s blog on Supreme Court decisions. Although, to be fair to you, it is much easier for you to go “HAW HAW NERDS”.

  5. Gee, and if we calculate the cost based on the entire world’s expenditures, we can reduce the amount spent by adding a few more decimals to the percentage spent.

    Sorry fellas, mis-spent healthcare dollars are wrong no matter what the amount spent.

    There are seriously ill people dying on waiting lists in Canada and people are trying to justify spending our very limitted dollars on banana removals.

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  7. Wow…you have eloquent writing ability. Sorry but you (and your minions) have the I.Q and empathy of a stone. It is FACTUAL and proven a human being can have the bits and pieces of one gender while having the hormonal/chemistry of the opposite. It would be nice, if even for one day, you could live life as say, a poor black man knowing in your (cold) heart you are a privileged white woman (like the one you are) and maybe you would understand the issue at hand. No, I am not talking about the blatant stereotyping and shameless name calling you blather on about (bigot? sounds like one to me). Paper thin defense/reply IMHO.

    Lets follow your logic shall we? Spending taxpayer dollars on terminally ill patients is “not medically required”. They are going to die at some point anyway, right? So, why try to prolong their life? Elderly? Why bother! The end of your chain of thought? I got it! To use a reference of those “that are often the target of some ribbing, cannot dress, live in parents basements, ETC.”, why don’t we just kill everyone when they reach the age of 30? Oh wait, while were at it, we could deny potential parents children who fail to screen for genetic defects. Imagine how many taxpayer dollars we can save! WAIT! Even better we can breed a master race and mass slaughter Jews, Blacks and anyone else who we don’t think is “medically required”! Oh wait that has been tried already. Epic failure.

    Closed minds such as yours should remain just that, CLOSED. Not allowed to associate with the rest of the human race that has moved on since…umm the 1600’s.

    “medically required” is obliviously up for debate. Sure a boob job isn’t, but to condemn someone to an existence they find intolerable because you don’t agree with the science as being a “necessity” to a having a quality of life you enjoy? Bask on your morally high soap box. The rain will come some day and melt it away.

  8. Hmm, I try to keep them factual with a high degree of editorial bias in the presentation. Which parts have I posted that are not factual Misterinvader?

  9. Wow George, from being in opposition of public funding for elective surgery to advocating for racial genocide.

    Quite a string of thought there.

    I suppose had I posted my opposition to public funding for nose jobs you would claim I was going to head us on the slippery slope towards armageddon.

    The gender confused can pay for their own surgeries.

    Healthcare dollars are better used on cancer and AIDs patients. You know, dying people.

  10. Funny. That is your logical string I threaded. You do note that I mention “boob jobs” in my post? By that I mean COSMETIC surgery. Nips and tucks as they are often referred to.

    cosmetic surgery (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cosmetic surgery)
    –noun
    plastic surgery for improving a person’s appearance by restoration of damaged areas of skin, removal of wrinkles or blemishes, etc.

    NOT: Gender reassignment
    A definition is not required since you and yours seem to have that dummified enough already. Here is a nice quote though.

    (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_reassignment_therapy)
    “The need for treatment is emphasized by the higher rate of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and various addictions, as well as a higher suicide rate among untreated transsexual people than in the general population.[1] Many of these problems, in the majority of cases, disappear or decrease significantly after a change of gender role and/or physical characteristics.[2]” Hmmm…that damages my position cause they “off” themselves with out the need for taxpayer dollars to pay for an execution.

    If so inclined, you can spend 5 minutes looking for yourself. I don’t have time or inclination to hold your hand. It is well documented that the cost is lower over the long term. You should know better than to speak on topics you have no clue about. Your entire soliloquy is based on zero fact and bigoted opinion. That is the slippery slope you stand on my friend. One of mis-education.

    I also doubt you are at the forefront “leading us to Armageddon”. Again, the soapbox. There are much more powerful people than you shaping policy. You just fuel the fire of intolerance and I figured maybe I can help educate a few while adding to your hit count.

  11. s a poster on MGK pointed out, wheelchairs, prosthetics, and similar are not required or necessary. Are you opposed to them being included in public health care?

  12. Actually, with very little google effort one can find that there are many questions regarding the outcomes of sex change surgeries despite your contentions.

    There is no consensus on this one in the medical and psychiatric world by any means. Sadly, most of the medical journals require a subscription to see the postoperative outcomes but there is no doubt that doctors are not in agreement in this realm.

    If these people can very possibly be just as messed up after the procedure as they were before it, I see no savings.

    Not good enough. We have better places to spend tax dollars.

    http://www.jstor.org/pss/3528648

    http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/139/4/417

    http://www.springerlink.com/content/q535w3734q322692/

    The list of differing opinions by doctors in journals goes on and on.

    Meanwhile there is near consensus on the positive outcomes of hip replacements.

    Better that we spent our money there.

  13. Cory, you’ve just cited one article that has little to do with the topic at hand (the Dreger article is about ethical issues regarding surgical treatment of physically gender-indeterminate children) and two that are, respectively, twenty-five and thirty years old.

    The current “list of differing opinions by doctors” consists largely of several old-school psychologists and psychiatrists who insist that the profession should return to considering transgenderism a mental illness. Your argument that there is “no consensus” is akin to global warming deniers claiming there is “no consensus” on climate change because they can find a small minority of cranks willing to play contrarian.

  14. That article deals with the treatments and there are many of them out there.

    They are not all dated, they simply differ from what you would like to see.

    Guess all those doctors must be bigots too.

  15. LOL…not going to buy those articles. In fact one states outright “considered as a last resort”. – Agreed. Never said otherwise. But, in your freight train of thought, we could stop treating people who have EVER had SEX for AIDS treatment. I mean really you dont get it from a toilette seat. Have you ever been in the sun, eaten grilled/fried food or consumed saccharin, we can deny them cancer treatment, right? All known carcinogens. Ignorance is no excuse. If we discover something else that you have been told was safe for years, but is determined to cause cancer later…sorry your care is cut off.

    You want to shun people who had no biological choice. If we can do that, whats stopping us from all of the scenarios I described earlier? THAT is my point. Maybe you never understood that. My guess you never will.

  16. What you write is nothing less than horrible, CM.

    Why? Because, let us assume that you are correct, something which I do not believe, but which we are now assuming anyway: Transsexuals are people suffering from insanity, and who are treated with unnecessary, irreversible surgery.

    Your reaction is mockery, insult, jokes about cutting off the private parts of transsexuals and complaining that you might waste an (utterly insignificant) amount of tax cents on it.

    Excuse me! If someone performed unnecessary lobotomies on the insane, my LEAST worry would be that I contributed 1.2 cents to it yearly through my taxes. I would be far more worried that it happened at all. And I most definitely would not joke about how I could perform lobotomies far cheaper than the doctors who did it.

  17. This article is pretty well written if read like a cracked.com one- that is, a sarcastic as hell one that no one will ever take seriously. With that in mind, good job. If that wasn’t your intention, maybe you should try working with them.

    Good Luck!

  18. My favorite thing we’ve got going on here is that of all the posts on the first page of this blog, nearly all have no comments. Two of them have one comment. This one has 19 and counting, and it’s all people from Chris Bird’s blog calling you a moron. How does that make you feel, Cory?

  19. I like how your article starts off with broad, sweeping generalizations about two separate groups of people. It really established the groundwork for your opus work, “I’m a stupid bigot and here’s why”.

  20. That article deals with the treatments and there are many of them out there.

    They are not all dated, they simply differ from what you would like to see.

    Cory, you can’t just say “well there’s lots of articles backing up my position” when you’re articulating what is at best a minority viewpoint – and furthermore the first three times you tried to do so, you came up with inapplicable or dated work.

    The standard view within the profession, as articulated by an article in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, the pre-eminent medical journal specializing in the subject matter, is that “results support the view that transsexualism is usually an isolated diagnosis and not part of any general psychopathological disorder” – and that transsexuals who desire gender reassignment and who receive it are mentally healthier.

  21. “They are not all dated, they simply differ from what you would like to see.”

    I’ve worked for several clinical psychiatrists for almost a dozen years and not once, in the thousands of articles I have retreived for them in that time, have I seen one of them utilize an article that was 25-30 years old to support their argument.

    Yes. An article that old *is* dated.

  22. Salmo: “How does that make you feel, Cory?”

    So far pretty good. This has opened some heated but generally pretty good discussion on the issue. I am actually feeling a little swayed now (though still not on the comic thing) and certainly would never have had I not poked this hornets nest.

    This has come from the more reasoned and sourced comments including the recent ones from MGK.

    The immediate accusations of bigotry of course simply close discussion and listening.

  23. I think even if one was willing to put aside any of the (implied) argument that TGD is somehow not an actual ailment (and for my money that argument begins and ends, with the current DSM-IV classification – I have no idea how else you’d implement effective healthcare policy that not be subject to the whims of whichever healthcare ministers happen to be in power at any given time) there’s a solid economic argument to be made for the subsidization of SRS. Incidentally it’s the same argument one can make for socializing most psychiatric medicine, birth-control, eyeglasses, massage therapy, or other “elective” or “preventative” medicines.

    The cost of preventative surgeries almost always outweigh continual “status quo” management.

    Their earliest detection and treatment mitigates the astronomical costs of long-term care. Let alone when that long-term care requires psychiatric or other clinical supervision. Even more when a near-guaranteed side-effect of non-treatment (suicidal depression) may require round-the-clock monitoring.

    Early application of procedures with high percentages of total correction should always take precedence over longer term monitoring when there’s a clear difference of total cost of implementation. That’s just solid economics.

  24. Cory,

    Assume for a moment that you’re right and this type of surgery really isn’t medically necessary. And that basing healthcare funding on procedures based on their “necessity” should be a rationale for adjusting expenditures. Who decides the definition of “necessary?” A group consortium of low-income or underserved populations? Maybe a strictly proportionate sample-section of the population, including representations of all social strata, income-levels, genders, and sexual preference types?

    You have to agree that probably won’t happen. However, I guess it does make sense that government officials and doctors and other high-paid, upper-class professionals should make those type of decisions for an entire populace. After all, the US Constitution was written by the white ruling class at the time and look how well we turned out.

  25. Rande,
    all good points. Socialized medicine must be prioritized and rationed. There simply is no getting around that.

    It is not as easy as saying that the most critical cases get all of the funding. A person who needs a few stitches still needs treatment as well as an individual requiring bypass surgery.

    How to balance the prioritization of funding will forever be in debate.

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