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Nevada’s liberal Republican gov. signs law forcing insurance companies to cover transgender surgeries – LifeSite

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CARSON CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Nevada’s liberal Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo signed legislation on Monday requiring health insurance companies to cover gender “transition” surgery, prompting denunciations from members of his own party.

Fox News reports that Lombardo signed SB 163, which requires insurers as well as Medicaid to “include in the policy coverage for the medically necessary treatment of conditions relating to gender dysphoria and gender incongruence,” including both “psychosocial and surgical intervention.”

As LifeSiteNews covered last week, the move follows Lombardo signing another bill backed by the LGBT lobby that requires prisons to adopt pro-transgender housing and training policies. 

Nevada Republican National Committeewoman Sigal Chattah excoriated Lombardo as a “laughingstock across the nation” for “serving” children up for “genital mutilation.” The conservative Nevada Policy Research Institute predicted that the new law will also raise Nevadans’ health insurance costs:

“I implore people to read the bill in its entirety,” Lombardo claimed in response to criticism. “And you will see it’s not as draconian or detrimental or immoral as people are portraying it to be.”

The defense appears to be based on the fact that the bill mandates coverage of “medically necessary” procedures but not “cosmetic” ones. But critics contend that no “transition” procedures are medically necessary and that the restriction is effectively meaningless as long as establishment medical institutions promulgate standards declaring otherwise. 

Evidence shows that “affirming” confusion about one’s biological sex carries severe harms, especially when such affirmation takes the form of physically transformative medical procedures, as well as when the subjects are impressionable children.

Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

The issue is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject.

Gender fluidity is not the only issue on which the governor of Nevada sides with Democrats over his own party; he recently also signed legislation to prohibit prosecution of abortionists in the state who break abortion laws in other states, essentially making Nevada a safe haven for abortionists who want to flout the laws of other states.

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