So last week here in Ontario, the Health Minister announced that sex-reassignment surgery would once again be covered by our public health system, ten years after the Mike Harris Tory government delisted it and forced the required procedures into private care.
For my money, this is unequivocally a good thing. People in need of gender assignment are rare (the estimated need for these surgeries in Ontario, a province of thirteen million people, is eight to ten surgeries annually), but differing gender identity is a tragic and indeed horrifying condition. I don’t mean “horrifying” as in “disgusting,” but in that the idea of having to live one’s life knowing – not believing, knowing – that your body and entire identity are both completely flawed is one that is both thankfully alien and exceptionally terrifying to me. I am enormously grateful that my gender identity as a dude is secure and that I never, ever have to worry about deep down feelings that I shouldn’t have a dick.
But of course, there are always going to be assholes. This is nothing new. But what gets me – what really just fucking gets me – is that these juvenile fuckwits can’t just go ahead and say, straight up, “we’re bigots.” They can’t just say “you know what, I fucking disapprove of gender reassignment surgery. I think transgenderism is bullshit and people who need sex change operations are crazy.”
You know why they don’t say that? They don’t say it because they are goddamned chickenshits.
Consider the enormously stupid Cory Morgan, who prefaces his photo-essay on how he will chop a guy’s dick off for $200 (of course, there’s no question of what he does for a female-to-male transsexual – I mean, you’d think he’d come up with some amusing photo-essay involving a series of dildos! Such stunning lack of work ethic) by attempting to justify his dislike of publicly funded gender reassignment surgery on fiscal grounds:
it has been pointed out that the de-bonings will only cost around $20,000 each. That must be comforting to people dying on waiting lists in Canada’s increasingly unsustainable socialized healthcare system. I would hate to be the nurse who has to explain to somebody; “I am sorry sir, we will have to delay your bypass surgery a little longer, the operating room is occupied by a man getting his weiner removed.”
Now, first off, 10 surgeries at about $20K each is a whopping $200K per year cost to the taxpayers of Ontario, and out of the approximately $34 billion Ontario spends on health care yearly represents a staggering .0000006% percent of the total budget. Compare to the estimated $1.8 billion dollars that the province spends treating smoking-related illnesses and it seems like kind of a bargain! And, of course, Cory overlooks that performing a gender reassignment surgery requires a highly specialized reproductive surgeon, who probably isn’t going to be doing any heart surgery any time soon.
Kathy Shaidle, on the other hand, justifies her complaining about “fake twats” by first snidely mentioning that Health Minister George Smitherman is TEH GHEY, then making an appeal-to-authority argument, linking to Paul McHugh. Paul McHugh, for those not aware, has essentially kept his psychological career alive despite completely disagreeing with any treatment or diagnosis made after 1970 by becoming the poster boy for dipshits like Kathy to link to. “HE WORKS AT JOHNS HOPKINS!” they scream. Which is true. In fact, he worked at Johns Hopkins when he decided not to reveal the identities of confessed child molesters to the police and concealed incidences of child rape. But, what the heck, it was only child rape!
Shaidle and Morgan are of course both blitheringly stupid and evidence of the continuing Americanization of Canada’s extreme right wing, but it’s worse than that; they’re simply unwilling to come right out and say “we don’t like transgenderism.” Shaidle, ironically, followed up her weaselly little slam by posting once more about Mark Steyn and the horrible injustice he suffers from having people say he’s a fucking bigot. She’ll complain endlessly about how free speech is quashed in Canada, but she’s not exactly eager to get up and engage in it by saying what she really, really wants to say.
Because, again: they’re chickenshits.
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I was going to type up some kind of reply but it ended being the written equivalent of the Tasmanian devil on a tear, all full spitting and growls and shit. So, I guess, just right on, you know?
I think it’s sad that I’m annoyed about the Americanization of the right wing comment, but I can’t say anything because it’s true…
When I’m out of college I’m moving to Canada.
Good for you guys, and your comments are spot on. Small expense, big difference in people’s lives.
Also, I’m sure that the Canadian medical profession as a whole really appreciates the implication that they’re a bunch of morons who can’t prioritize surgeries according to need
Actually, whoever you are: I did come right out and say that gender reassignment surgery for adults IS crap, the people who “need” it are crazy, etc.
And I am a bigot. I say so all the time. Too bad you can’t admit just as freely that your reading comprehension skills are on the same low level as most progressives.
God I love you.
Ah, but Kathy, you didn’t. You let Paul McHugh say it for you, then said “well, he’s a big-time doctor person!”
Appeal to authority – the classic strategy of a chickenshit.
“How dare you accuse me of not writing something I did not actually write in the first place!” Hey, Kathy, since when does reading comprehension imply that the readers must read things that aren’t actually written down?
Shaidle and Morgan are of course both blitheringly stupid and evidence of the continuing Americanization of Canada’s extreme right wing, but it’s worse than that; they’re simply unwilling to come right out and say “we don’t like transgenderism.”
It’s the same with bigots everywhere; like homo-haters who hide behind that “the traditional definition of marriage” nonsense (as though the traditional exclusion of gay people from marriage were not part and parcel of the broader tradition of using social ostracism and violence to make gay people shit-scared of being who they are).
My only quibble with your argument (and this is always my quibble) is how you would suggest defining someone “needing” gender reassignment surgery. This is physically changing the body in order to cure a psychological condition, which…I don’t think you can really compare that to anything else (can you? Plastic surgery? I dunno).
If someone’s heart fails, it fails, and you can’t argue with the fact that they need a new heart. But this – I will readily admit that I am pretty much completely ignorant when it comes to psychology, but it doesn’t seem to be an exact science.
I don’t have a problem with transgenderism, but I don’t understand how you know where the line is between wanting it and really needing it enough to have the government cover it.
Hey, anyone who complains about bigots being a little more close-lipped than not shouldn’t consider themselves offended, they should consider themselves spoiled. Why don’t Morgan and Shaidle “say what they really think”? Because if they did, they’re afraid they’d get canned.
Now, compare these two clowns to – say – Glenn Beck or Michael Savage. Here we have two men daring enough to run out and question whether the first elected Muslim Congressmen is plotting to blow up the Capital Building and whether former Senator and Presidential Candidate John Edwards has a penis to begin with. Once you get by the extreme amounts of stupid inherent in their daily diatribes, you have to appreciate the fact that both these men have nationally syndicated soap box platforms.
You don’t have to flip through your TV channels or your radio dials and worry about stepping on a land mine like this with Morgan and Shaidle. They’ll happily cloak their stupidity in the guise of pop psychology or fiscal responsibility. Of course, this is a double-edged sword. You can mock the pop psychologist for his Dr Phil stylizing. You can tear into the fiscal budgeteer for military spending or pork projects. But when a guy stands up and says “transgender people are FREAAAAKS!” there’s really no where to go. The speaker has no shame. His audience has already fully embraced a healthy dose of stupid. There’s no arguing with that kind of hateful ignorance until someone, ten years from now, finally catches one of these bozos wearing a dress and boinking a male hooker (as inevitably occurs).
Still, I’ll take your Morgans and your Shaidles over my Rush Limbaughs and my Johan Goldbergs any day. You’ve got it easy.
These people aren’t chickenshits. They’re simply lying to themselves to either make up for a lack of knowledge they’re too lazy (or uninterested enough) to research thoroughly or to help sustain a bigger lie they’ve told themselves which is usually regarding the existence of invisible sky genies.
Its not cowardice that drives them, its willful and consensual ignorance. And because their lie makes their world more sparkly, its near impossible to show these assclowns that they’re wrong and that reality isn’t the eternal John Wayne movie they’ve dreamed it to be.
SmR-
Put it in basic book terms. If you switch Captain America’s consciousness with that of Wonder Woman, ain’t nobody gonna be happy. The wrong body is the wrong bosy, that’s all there is to it. Most of us are so extremely lucky to be in the right body, we don’t even know that it’s possible for that to get screwed up. But if you’re Diana all hating on the world of man, you don’t care that you are inhabiting the body of the man WHO PUNCHED HITLER. It doesn’t matter how excessively awesome Cap is, you know you’re not supposed to be walking around in his meatsack and you’ll never be comfortable in it.
“The Americanization of the right wing”. All too true, and pretty ironic that Canadian right-wingers started to embrace these tactics just about exactly as the Bush administration’s hold on the media and the voters began to crumble. It really ought to be clear from a cursory glance over the last few years that the Bush-Cheney technique for glomming onto power simply does not work in the long term–it leaves the ruling party fractured and rudderless, unable to adjust to shifts in the political wind. If it’s not clear yet, the 2008 elections ought to really hammer the point home.
I was going to express my continued disappointment that MGK’s enraged opponents that show up on his blog and start talking shit don’t actually continue the argument, but I believe that when your opponent has, with no trace of sarcasm or irony, said the words “I am a bigot”, the argument is over, and the other person has won.
additionally: lol, TEH GHEY
So the argument is apparently that those who feel the need for a sex-change operation should receive psychological counseling instead. But as I understand it, a sex-change operation is never performed without extensive counselling beforehand.
Zenrage, if they were to go out and do research, would they really find a unified body of academic, peer-reviewed research that unilaterally proves them wrong?
Oooo, he works at Johns Hopkins. Tim Leary worked at Harvard. So fucking what?
And if you think transgenders are crazy, then fine. They can go get counseling. What happens when the doc suggests surgery?
Oh, and I really hope everyone else noticed the blackly amusing fact that a Roman Catholic writer is using McHugh’s writing.
Hear, hear. I just want to note, on the fiscal-responsibility kick: a lot of people in the transgender spectrum will try to off ourselves when access to treatment is unavailable, so there’s always the alternative of paying for people’s failed suicide attempts.
SmR –
Actually, to get surgery, you must conform to the WPATH (formerly HBIGDA) standards of care, meaning you must have at least two years of therapy and three (or two, it’s been a while) doctors’ notes. The guidelines are mostly seen to err more harmfully on the side of restriction than permissiveness. There is a large body of high-grade research out there pointing in a very specific direction, Andrew, but as Zenrage noted, “I don’t want to hear about it” categorically thwarts edification.
Kathy Shaidle, assuming the poster be she – I was going to try for some pithy one-liner that would satisfy my instinct to combat ignorance via stupid internet drama. Then I read your website, and saw that it did the work of a hundred bon mots.
Actually, we’re just shipping our extreme Right Wing north. Shhhhhhh.
I’m not telling you when we’re going to try to smuggle Karl Rove across the border, though.
[…] 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. […]
Of course, since the current government did this after five years in power, after a hue and cry from basically no one, maybe everyone should stop pretending this is some vital issue of the day. No one seemed to give a darn one way or the other before Smitherman’s move, right?
Garnet: To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even know that Ontario didn’t cover gender reassignment surgery any more until Smitherman said it was back on the books, and only found Morgan’s dumbass site (and the link to Shaidle through it) because I was directed there after commenting on it elsewhere.
Had I been aware it wasn’t on the books, you would have counted me as an enthusiastic supporter of putting it back there.
If you want to amputate a healthy body part, you are insane. Period. Please be insane on your own dime.
^I particularly liked that comment. Aside from the psychological condition where people do, in fact, want to amputate a body part (I read a fascinating interview with one such person, where they had an “accident” and now feel so at peace, but I’m off point), aside from that – is this person now suggesting that insane people should also not get government assistance in treating their conditions? Hell, is that the standard in Canada – if you need mental treatment, you pay for it? And if so, who enforces it?
Yay, tolerance!
*shakes head*
Some people just don’t get it. Thank you, MGK.
Couldn’t we just spend the money on therapy + psychological research? Something in the long-term budget?