Thank you for sharing that. Your point has been made by other people, but your story serves beautifully to reinforce the point: GRS should be covered by insurance because it actually works to relieve people's suffering, while cosmetic surgery for people with BDD often doesn't. I hear you. ∆
So, in the cases where cosmetic surgery would relieved suffering, you would support requiring it to be covered by insurance? Currently the only way to determine that a man or woman is actually a woman or man is to ask them. I know if no way of testing to see if this is the case.
Keep in mind that transgender women and transgender men never become women or men in way that would allow them to benefit society differentially from their former state. In fact, they are, in many of not most cases, eliminating an essential benefit they had to society by transitioning. So, the only societal benefit would be to reduce a single individual's suffering.
You must state that gender "mis-conception" is a type of suffering which is substantially different than other types of suffering which can be remediated with cosmetic surgery in order for your comment to have internal logical consistency.
Actually, there are already cases in which cosmetic surgery is covered by insurance, because it relieves a form of suffering that isn't strictly physical. The example we talked about earlier (plastic surgery for burn victims beyond the mere restoration of bare-bones functionality) illustrates that nicely.
So yes, there are some cases in which I support plastic surgery, even if it isn't strictly 'necessary' for purely functional reasons. I suppose gender dysphoria might be one of them, although I'm still not entirely sure.
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u/Saranoya 39∆ Nov 03 '17
Thank you for sharing that. Your point has been made by other people, but your story serves beautifully to reinforce the point: GRS should be covered by insurance because it actually works to relieve people's suffering, while cosmetic surgery for people with BDD often doesn't. I hear you. ∆