by Madison Pauly
January 31, 2023
Introduction:
(Mother Jones)
Shauntae Anderson lived for the weekends. Growing up Black and transgender in a small West Virginia city in the 1990s, she spent a lot of time alone, hiding her self-knowledge from her mom and coping with ridicule from classmates. Yet on Friday and Saturday nights, she could lock herself in her room, put on Whitney Houston or Aretha Franklin, and try on the few pieces of women’s clothing she’d stashed away. “I would put those things on, put makeup on, and look at myself in the mirror. Make myself so I felt pretty,” Anderson, now 46, says. Yet the night always had to end. “Silent tears would just flow down my face as I’m wiping it off,” she remembers.
When she came out to her doctor as a teen, Anderson says she was told there was nothing they could do for her. As an adult without health insurance, she wanted her body to change so badly that she tried popping birth control pills for their minuscule dose of hormones. It wasn’t until she was 40 years old and incarcerated in a federal prison that a doctor finally agreed to treat her gender dysphoria, the medical diagnosis for what she’d been going through.
Finally getting the prescription hormones she’d needed for so many years was “liberating,” Anderson says. Her skin softened; her breasts grew. Her cellmate, also trans, pointed out gradual changes in her figure.
The article then explains that while Shauntae could obtain prescription hormones, transition surgery was not an option allowed by insurance or personal budget constraints.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... q-attack/In late 2021, Anderson agreed to join a lawsuit challenging West Virginia’s Medicaid exclusion for gender-confirming surgery. The case, filed by the LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal and local partners, argued that West Virginia was violating federal anti-discrimination law by denying coverage for surgical procedures used to treat gender dysphoria, while approving them for other diagnoses.
Last August, they won: A federal judge threw out West Virginia’s Medicaid exclusion. “The same or similar surgical treatments are available…when the diagnosis requiring that treatment is not gender dysphoria,” District Court Judge Robert Chambers wrote in his ruling, pointing to mastectomies as an example. “When treatment is precluded for a diagnosis based on one’s gender identity, such exclusion invidiously discriminates on the basis of sex and transgender status.”