Autostraddle recently highlighted the New York Medicaid campaign being run jointly by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, GLAAD, and TransJustice, a program of the Audre Lorde Project.
Lack of care can be more expensive because patients who can’t receive care for their treatment through safe channels may turn to buying hormones off the street or get surgeries from unlicensed practitioners and then develop serious medical problems, according to Fukui. It’s politics, not economics or medical concerns, that drive the refusal to cover health care for trans and gender nonconforming people, he said.
“New York draws a lot of LGBT people, and people think that if they get here they’ll have access to the things they need,” Fukui said. “We have a very large trans population here, and folks are coming here and realizing that the things that happen everywhere are happening here and it’s not quite a liberal gay utopia they were hoping for.”
That’s why media campaigns like the one by this coalition are so critical. Many people have no idea of how broad and devastating the effects of policies like the one in New York can be, nor do they know what “trans health care” entails.
“We want people to know that trans-inclusive healthcare isn’t “special” healthcare,” said Dani Heffernan, GLAAD’s media strategist. “It’s the same healthcare that people who aren’t trans have access to when they need it, but it’s specifically denied to trans people under many health insurance policies, including New York State Medicaid.”
Read the full story at Autostraddle. Watch the video below.
