Defunding sex-changes is not discrimination

By Naomi Lakritz, Calgary Herald

Yes, the government’s decision to axe funding for sex-change surgery is discriminatory, but not the way transgender people think it is.

“Discrimination” in this instance refers simply to the act of having to discriminate by choosing among a number of budget options because there isn’t enough health-care money to go around. It seems more than a tad paranoid to instantly ascribe the delisting of sex-change surgery to latent bigotry, when the province has been paying for it for more than a decade.

In fact, the province continued funding this surgery all those years while beds were being closed and other services went without. It’s been the same bunch of Tories all along — the same ones, incidentally, who are putting sexual orientation into the human-rights law.

Are we really supposed to believe that while they’re doing the right thing by the law, and after years of paying for the surgery, they’re suddenly and simultaneously hell-bent on persecuting the transgendered? That’s quite a stretch.

I’m no fan of the Tory government, but accusing them of violating human rights in this case is ridiculous. Choices have to be made at budget time, and in the grand scheme of priorities, elective surgery in non-life-or-death situations is a logical target. Let’s face it — no matter how much it is claimed that doctors say a sex-change operation is medically necessary, the surgical reshaping of one’s physical gender characteristics is not on a par with heart bypasses or tumour removal. It is akin to cosmetic surgery. And like cosmetic surgery, it should be paid for out of pocket.

Shall we also say the Tories are bigoted toward chiropractic patients, since they delisted funding assistance for those folks, too? Maybe chiropractic patients should file a human rights complaint against the province, since the Tories apparently hate people who want neck and back adjustments as much as they hate the transgendered.

This business of filing human rights complaints to force government to give you taxpayers’ money sets a very disquieting precedent. Government must be free to manage its budget matters as it sees fit–accountable to the taxpayers whose money it is, not to a human rights commission. But just hypothetically, you know who should really be filing a human rights complaint against the province over health-care spending? No, not the transgendered crowd.

Cancer patients — that’s who.

Last week, Calgary oncologist Dr. Peter Craighead said that wait times for treatment are bound to get longer because space is so limited at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, which has been over-capacity for six years. The new provincial budget, however, has no money for expansions or even a whole new centre. Do those clamouring the loudest over this grievous injustice done to the transgendered feel one bit of embarrassment for making such a fuss about funding when the survival of cancer patients is at stake without timely radiation and chemotherapy?

Shame on these people who are in good health, but who are trying to force the province to pay up via the human rights commission, when cancer patients stand to suffer much graver consequences.

The argument that the $700,000 a year spent on sex-change surgery is a drop in the ocean of the health-care budget, doesn’t wash. There’s a principle at stake here — as long as there’s no money in the budget for life-and-death essentials like more timely cancer care, the non-essentials must fall by the wayside. That $700,000 needs to be disbursed into the “essential” category to maximize the good it can do.

There is no doubt that people who want sex-change operations feel a very real need to have it done to make their lives complete. But they also go through years of counselling and preparation for such a momentous transformation–years in which they could be setting aside the money and saving up for the surgery.

You want to talk about human rights? How about the right of a 15-year-old boy with leukemia to live to see his dreams of university and a career materialize? What about the right of a 40-year-old woman with breast cancer to live to see her young children grow up? Cancer violates human rights in so many ways every single day. Governments cannot fund everything, and when the money isn’t there for the Tom Baker Centre, then it shouldn’t be spent on a fringe group whose lives, unlike those of cancer patients, do not hang in the balance.

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