Tag: medical

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Hobby Lobbied

There’s a part of me that wishes we could all go back to bed and pretend it’s Sunday night so that there would still be a chance these awful rulings wouldn’t have been handed down by the Supreme Court today, but they were.

The first is that labor unions can’t collect dues automatically from the workers they represent in negotiations with the management. It will decimate labor unions and workers’ rights.

The second is that corporations don’t have to cover contraception. The fear is that this will allow corporations to decide what kind of healthcare they have to insure. What’s happened is this: we are not talking about an individual being able to choose based on religious exemptions. We’re talking about a corporation being able to. As Justice Ginsberg put it:

In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Theoretically, then, a corporation could not provide pre natal care, trans health care, etc. If the company is owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, they could deny all access to modern medicine because that’s their religious beliefs. Also, “contraception” isn’t just the pill; it’s also the shot (Depo-Provera), the ring (Nuvaring), contraceptive implants (IUD), diaphragms, cervical caps and permanent contraceptive methods, like tubal ligation. I haven’t read yet if it includes vasectomies, but it should (and I’m guessing doesn’t, because patriarchy).

The fear is a slippery slope where religious exemptions are claimed in order to deny LGBTQ+ people employment or marriage benefits. Why should they have to cover my wife’s health insurance if they believe my marriage is immoral and against their religious beliefs?

Here are some of Justice Ginsberg’s best quotes in her dissent, some of the major issues, and a brief synopsis of her grounds for it.

The good news, if there is any good news, is that most corporations will continue to cover contraception because financially, speaking, birth control is way easier to pay for than pregnancy.

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Trans Health in WA

This is HUGE. Via Gender Justice League and The Seattle Times:

In a letter Wednesday to health insurance companies, the state makes clear that it is illegal to discriminate against transgender policyholders under both state law and the federal Affordable Care Act.

Specifically, an insurance company cannot deny services for a transgender person solely on the basis of gender status. Additionally, the health insurer must pay for gender transition procedures if they are deemed medically necessary and if they’re covered for other policyholders for different reasons. Those procedures include hormone therapy, counseling services, gender-transition process, mastectomy, and breast augmentation and reconstruction.

And just like that, Gender Justice League has an FAQ up to answer all your questions, such as:

WHAT CAN I DO TO PROVE MEDICAL NECESSITY?

Medical necessity is determined on a case by case basis through guidelines established by your insurer. However, we believe that if you follow the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards of care version 7 you should be able to make an argument that your care is medically necessary. While there is no guarantee that your insurance will absolutely cover your care, following the WPATH standards of care is helpful in establishing the medical necessity of your care. Discuss with your doctor or therapist what course of medical care is best in your case. You can download the WPATH standards of care here: http://www.genderjusticeleague.org/socv7.pdf

If you’d like to help them celebrate, Seattle’s Trans Pride still needs funding, so do go donate.

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Gender Binary’s Disservice

This just in from the “We’re not just making this stuff up” department of gender studies, where we don’t actually just talk about how the binary prescribes and proscribes our lives, but even moreso, how it influences and limits medical research:

Both men and women make estrogen out of testosterone, and men make so much that they end up with at least twice as much estrogen as postmenopausal women. As levels of both hormones decline with age, the body changes. But until now, researchers have focused almost exclusively on how estrogen affects women and how testosterone affects men.

Sadly, we have known for a very long while that men have & need estrogen and vice versa, that neither is the “male” hormone or “female” hormone, and yet we persist in separating these hormones based on their dominance in one kind of body or another.

The article goes on to point out that middle aged spread in men is likely due to a decrease in estrogen levels, which was previously believed to be caused by the decrease of T, which, coincidentally, has lead to a $2 billion dollar testosterone industry. Go figure.

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NYC Editorial Board Calls for Manning’s Humane Treatment

This is what I call a Big Fucking Deal: The NYT Editorial Board wrote a piece calling for medical transition care for Private Manning and for other trans prisoners like her, making the important point too that her housing should be safe but not isolated due to the heightened risk of sexual assault in prison for trans people.It begins:

When Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning, declared that she wanted to live as a woman, the Army’s response was callous and out of step with medical protocol, stated policies for transgender people in civilian federal prisons and existing court rulings.

and then ends:

Private Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, said last week that he hoped military prison officials would voluntarily provide hormone treatment, without a lawsuit. It should not take a court order to get officials — including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel — to do the right thing. They should give Private Manning appropriate medical care and safe but not unduly isolated housing, which should be available for all transgender prisoners.

What is most remarkable to me is that I read and edited a draft by trans activist Danielle Askini of Seattle’s Gender Justice League which will run in tomorrow’s Seattle Times – and its ask and major points are essentially the same as the Times’ letter.

Very, very exciting stuff.

 

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On Vaccinations

I have a lot of friends with children, and I’m increasingly chagrined that my own peers are taking their political views on Big Pharma to a place that puts all of us at greater risk of dying of things we don’t have to die of.

So to explain how it all works, what “peer reviewed” means, and to comment on various “But — ” arguments, here’s this very good, clear article about what it all means, including links out about how places with low percentages of vaccination are getting the most diseases, and to this one about how herd immunity works.

That is all.

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Trans Elders

Although the language seems a little dated (“transgendered” and “T-girls” most especially) these seem like worthwhile studies and good for anyone providing medical services for trans people, especially an aging population.

The transgendered population confronts a myriad of difficulties which hospice must also address.  Socially, transgendered folk, gentle folk, find themselves relegated to a near-netherworld existence.  Forced to society’s fringes they feel isolated, even abandoned, by family and friends.  They may find their friendships restricted to a “gay-friendly” environment or to other ‘T-girls’.  Many T-girls succumb to a personal economic collapse with a loss of job, loss of insurance, and even a homeless existence.

I like “gentle folk”. While it’s not always true, you get a sense of who Dr. Killeen “met” by reading these studies. At least I do.

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Dex and DES

A few years ago it looked likely that we’d discover a drug that might be taken prenatally by mothers whose children might have a high risk of CAH – in order to prevent it.

Since CAH is the only intersex condition that can necessitate medical treatment, and specifically might prevent an “adrenal crisis” that can be life threatening to a newborn with CAH – this development could have been a good thing.

Except that it’s off-label use it intended to prevent lesbians and tomboys. And career women. Depending on how exactly you’re going to define female masculinity.

It’s nice to see Slate finally reporting on it, despite the dumb-ass & sensationalist title of the article, & I’m hoping that means this question gets put to a much wider range of parents and potential parents.

Here’s the paper by Dreger, Feder and Tamar-Mattis.
Here’s a summation out of Northwestern.

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WI Prison Law & GID

A while back, a federal judge here in Wisconsin ruled that the 2005 Sex Change Prevention Act (really? was that necessary?) was deemed unconstitutional because it represents:

“deliberate indifference to the plaintiffs’ serious medical needs in violation of the Eighth Amendment,” because it denies hormone therapy without regard to those needs or doctors’ judgments.

The U.S. 7th District Court of Appeals upheld his ruling last year, and just this week, the Supreme Court turned it down for review.

Which means, overall, that trans prison inmates in WI, IL, and IN can get medical care for their transition while in prison.

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Meds for Women

It’s pretty ridiculous that most clinical trial leaders effectively ignore the fact that women absorb and metabolize drugs completely differently than men, especially since, according to this study, women use an average of five prescription drugs compared to less than four for men — and that’s not even counting their slutty prescription contraceptives. In 100% of the study’s clinical trials, women failed to take prescriptions as directed, and were often not prescribed correct dosages to begin with. The study focused on cardiovascular disease — the number one killer of women in the U.S. — and diabetes, since more than half of diabetics are women. If more women than men are dying from these diseases, how come their antidotes are still tailored to men’s bodies?

asks this Jezebel article, and it’s about goddamned time. Most clinical studies are done assuming the patient is a testosterone-dominant, 200 lb. person. If you are not, your meds aren’t accurate.

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Medical Treatment of Trans Youth

This is the kind of progress that is long overdue.

Switching gender roles and occasionally pretending to be the opposite sex is common in young children. But these kids are different. They feel certain they were born with the wrong bodies.

Some are labeled with “gender identity disorder,” a psychiatric diagnosis. But Spack is among doctors who think that’s a misnomer. Emerging research suggests they may have brain differences more similar to the opposite sex.

Spack said by some estimates, 1 in 10,000 children have the condition.

and

These children sometimes resort to self-mutilation to try to change their anatomy; the other two journal reports note that some face verbal and physical abuse and are prone to stress, depression and suicide attempts. Spack said those problems typically disappear in kids who’ve had treatment and are allowed to live as the opposite sex.

No kidding.