Yesterday, Beth Bourne published this essay on a website called "Reality's Last Stand":
"I Pretended To Be ‘Nonbinary’ To Expose a Medical Scandal at Kaiser Permanente: Kaiser gender specialists were eager to approve hormones and surgeries, which would all be covered by insurance as 'medically necessary.'" Feb 26, 2024.
In this essay, she identifies as "a 53-year-old mom from Davis, CA." She said that, five years ago, her "intellectually mature but socially immature" 8th-grade "daughter," along with a few classmates, began identifying as trans and asked to be called by he/him pronouns at school. She and her ex-husband refused to help their child get gender-affirming care, and told their child it would be up to him to do so when he became a legal adult. At 17, the child cut off contact with Bourne. "I began publicly voicing my concerns about what many term as 'gender ideology.'"
So basically, instead of trying to fix her relationship with her child, she leaned harder into her own anti-trans ideology. As she clarifies: "While this estrangement brought me sorrow, with my daughter living full-time with her father, it also gave me the space to be an advocate/activist in pushing back on gender identity ideology in the schools and the medical industry."
This was the assignment she gave herself:
"Could I expose the medical scandal of 'gender-affirming care' by saying and doing everything my daughter and other trans-identifying kids are taught to do? Would there be the type of medical safeguarding and differential diagnosis we would expect in other fields of medicine, or would I simply be allowed to self-diagnose and be offered the tools (i.e. hormones and surgeries) to choose my own gender adventure and become my true authentic self?"
It's a rough start, because gender-affirming care isn't a medical scandal, it's something that has existed in the United States for about a century.
Bourne wanted to show that "anyone suffering from delusions of their sex, self-hatred, or identity issues" could receive "body-altering hormones and surgeries" (as opposed to hormones and surgeries that don't alter your body? headscratcher), and that it would be "all covered by insurance."
THANK YOU FOR LETTING TRANS PEOPLE KNOW WHERE YOU CAN GET ALL YOUR GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE COVERED BY HEALTH INSURANCE
Most trans people do not have that kind of coverage. We should, but we don't. Again: Such coverage isn't a problem, partly because most people don't have it, and partly because it would actually be a good thing if we did have it.
"I decided to go undercover as a nonbinary patient to show my daughter what danger she might be putting herself in—by people who purport to have her health as their interest, but whose main interest is in medically “affirming” (i.e., transitioning) whoever walks through their door."
"My feigned gender transition," Bourne says, lasted 231 days.
"I was able to instantly change my medical records to reflect my new gender identity and pronouns." Of course. That's her doctor's notation indicating how she'd like people to understand her and refer to her when speaking about her.
She received "a prescription for testosterone and approval for a 'gender-affirming' double mastectomy from my doctor. It took only three more months (90 days) to be approved for surgery to remove my uterus and have a fake penis constructed from the skin of my thigh or forearm."
Her beliefs about autonomy
Shouldn't she have "adult bodily autonomy" to do this? No, she says, because autonomy applies — she claims — to "purely cosmetic procedures" that aren't covered by health insurance and supposedly don't "compromise health." (Famously, "breast implants, liposuction, and facelifts" have no potential side effects?)
For some reason she doesn't explain, she believes that if a procedure on one's body is deemed "medically necessary" or "lifesaving," if it's covered by insurance, and/or if it might have a side effect, she should not have autonomy to make her own decisions about her body.
Also, for some reason she doesn't explain, she seems to believe a child would have the same kind of interactions with their doctor as she did at age 53.
Also, while being (presumably) neither trans nor delusional, and while making an intentionally timewasting and fraudulent request for hormones and surgery she didn't actually want, she presents this as what a person could get if they were not trans but actually delusional, and (I guess) assumes that the person would be ignorant of what they were asking for and would regret it, and thus should not have autonomy to ask for it.
I think she thinks she was successfully cosplaying a self-destructive cis person, rather than successfully cosplaying a happy nonbinary person.
She also implies that her own fake request is somehow equivalent to her child's request. Her article does not explore the possibility that, while her own performative request was in bad faith, her child's request seems not to have been. From the information she gives, whereas Bourne lied about her own gender to her doctor for 10 months and asked for hormones and surgery she didn't want, her child has been asserting a gender for five years now and could actually just get whatever hormones and surgery he wants. As an adult, he's free to do so.
(And hopefully he'll remain free to do so, despite the pending U.S. legislation to eliminate the right to gender-affirming care for adults as well as children.)
Takeaway
Your doctor will recommend you for hormones and surgeries based on the thing you said. If you lie to your doctor, you can get what you lied to get.
Also, if you commit insurance fraud for nearly a year and blog about it in detail, you can get whatever the consequences of that may be.
This is probably not the way to convince your trans kid to talk to you. But if you're more interested in "publicly voicing my concerns about what many term as 'gender ideology,'" you have the blog post you wrote, and may it keep you warm.
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