(The Center Square) – An LGBTQ+ organization in California is asking the Golden State’s lawmakers to allocate $26 million in general fund revenue to help pay for gender-affirming care for minors.
“This is more of a preventative budget ask than anything else,” Danny Ceseña, network director for the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network, told The Center Square on Friday. “This budget ask will mainly go into effect only if the federal government, in their CMS-proposed rules, prevent access to gender-affirming care for minors, especially minors that receive their insurance benefits through Medi-Cal.” (CMS stands for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.)
In December, The Center Square reported that federally-funded health care programs would be kept from paying for gender-affirming care for transgender children. Children who identify as transgender who are on Medicare and those under 19 years old on the federally funded Children’s Health Insurance Program would not be able to use federal money to pay for gender-affirming care under the new rules.
Opponents to gender-affirming care see that as a good thing.
“I just can’t even believe we live in the most beautiful nation in the world and the most beautiful state, arguably, in our nation, and here we are, cutting healthy body parts and asking taxpayers to fund it,” Sonja Shaw, a Republican candidate for California superintendent of public instruction, told The Center Square on Friday afternoon.
In a letter signed by 87 organizations in California sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders in February, LGBTQ+ advocates urged the state’s leaders to allocate the money to prevent irreversible provider withdrawals and protect patients from gaps in care. The letter goes on to say that 84,600 Californian children are transgender.
Ceseña added that gender-affirming care doesn’t just include surgery. One of the first steps in care for transgender youth is therapy, Ceseña told The Center Square.
“The first thing a provider thinks of is the mental health aspect,” Ceseña said. “Is the child going to therapy, seeing a therapist and talking about their gender dysphoria? That’s the major piece of gender-affirming care and what needs to be covered.”
Therapy would continue for months, Ceseña said, and if the minor’s parents and therapist believed therapy wasn’t enough in the child’s treatment, puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy would be the next steps.
“All the steps to gender-affirming care really starts with therapy,” Ceseña said. “What type of parent or constituent would not want to make sure any child does not have access to therapy services to fully ensure that this is what the child absolutely needs and the parents are on board with gender transition?”
Gender-affirming care, no matter what it looks like, can’t start or move forward without parents’ consent, Ceseña told The Center Square.
However, Shaw said therapists who see children with gender dysphoria face pressure to lie to children.
“We have professionals who are being told their license will be stripped away if they tell the kids the truth, which is they’re not born in the wrong body,” Shaw told The Center Square. “[For] these people, therapy to them is to continue to force kids down a pathway that’s going to harm them for the rest of their life.”
Shaw said she wants to see more therapists affirming that children are born in the right bodies, not the wrong ones.
“No one’s against telling a child they’re born in the right body, but these people are literally pushing and legislating medical professionals that they have to go along with it,” Shaw said. “I urge people to not be part of this, because it’s undeniable that these children will face problems for the rest of their life that adults contributed to.”
Beth Bourne, an activist who has described herself on social media as a mom who exposes gender ideology in California public schools, did not respond to The Center Square’s request for comment on Friday. Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization that advocates for parental rights, also did not respond.