SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s first transgender soldier plans to file an administrative litigation after the military decided to discharge her from her duties on Wednesday.

Byun Hui-Su, staff sergeant and tank driver, stationed in Gyeonggi Province, north of Seoul, underwent gender reassignment surgery in Thailand last year while on leave.

“She is indeed very brave. I think it is time for change in Korean society to embrace the gender diversity and minority groups as part of our members,” said Jieun Lee, a human rights, finance and art specialty lawyer who helps represent Byun along with the Military Human Rights Korea and Lawyers’ Knowledge Forum pro bono committee, told ABC News.

Byun was waiting for the court to approve her request to change legal gender from male to female. The National Human Rights Commission has recommended that the military wait three months before any discharge decision is made.

But South Korea’s military abruptly discharged Byun on Wednesday based on a related military personnel management act which allows discharge of people with physical or mental disabilities if those problems were not a result of combat or in the line of duty.

“It is very disappointing and annoying that the military medical review committee sees her transgender operation as physical defect based on legal gender as male,” Lee added.

Shortly after the military announcement, Byun, holding back tears, read a statement to the press describing her childhood dreams of becoming a soldier.

She was proud to have made that choice but confessed “symptoms of depression turned worse day by day because of gender dysphoria” throughout her duty.

“(Being a soldier) was my earnest dream but I continuously thought that I could not serve the military in this condition,” she read. “Apart from my gender identity, I want to show everyone that I can also be one of the great soldiers who protect this country.”

This is the first time in South Korea that an active-duty member has been referred to a military panel to determine whether to end his or her service due to a sex reassignment operation.

South Korea prohibits transgender people from joining the military but has no specific laws on what to do with those who have sex reassignment operations during their time in service.

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Two transgender women are suing Florida government agencies for being denied gender-affirming health care under the state employee health plan’s exclusion for “gender reassignment or modification services or supplies.”

It’s the latest legal challenge to state health plans that deny coverage for gender-affirming procedures.

The Florida lawsuit, filed Monday, argues that the state’s exclusion of gender-affirming care violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. The plaintiffs, Jami Claire and Kathryn Lane, are state workers who were denied treatment for gender dysphoria. Claire is a scientist who has worked at the University of Florida for over three decades, and Lane is an attorney in the public defender’s office in Tallahassee.

“This was an intentional decision made by the [Florida] Department of Management Services to exclude this type of care, and we know that because there is already an exclusion for non-medically necessary care,” Simone Chriss, attorney at Southern Legal Counsel, told Rewire.News. “If what our plaintiffs were seeking was not medically necessary, it would just be denied for that reason, but it wasn’t. It was denied under the exclusion for gender-affirming care, which means that they recognize it is medically necessary but they choose not to cover it.”

The ACLU of Florida, Southern Legal Counsel, and pro bono attorney Eric Lindstrom filed the lawsuit against the Florida Department of Management Services, the Public Defender of the Second Judicial Circuit of Florida, and the University of Florida.

Claire said Florida’s exclusion of gender-affirming care has affected her financially and emotionally. She has had to pay out of pocket for many of the procedures she needs.

“When I had tried to access the medical care, the exclusion was there and I couldn’t access it and I had three suicide attempts,” she said. “Life wasn’t worth living at that point.”

Claire added, “I’ve spent thousands of dollars already and if this exclusion is not overturned and I get to the point where I retire, I will have to use approximately a third of my retirement money to pay for bottom surgery.”

Hormone replacement therapy, electrolysis, augmentation mammoplasty, orchiectomy, and facial feminization surgery were some of the procedures denied by the plaintiffs’ state plans due to the exclusion of gender-affirming care.

Transgender people face numerous barriers to health care access, including discrimination by health-care providers and economic barriers to accessing affordable care. According to the 2015 U.S. Trans Survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality, one-third of respondents who had seen a health-care provider in the past year had at least one negative experience related to being transgender. One in four respondents said they had a problem with their insurance in the past year related to being transgender, such as being denied gender-affirming care. Black, Native American, Latinx, and multiracial trans people were more likely to be uninsured than white trans people, according to the survey.

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have policies that prohibit health-care discrimination based on gender identity, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline. Twenty-one states have no policy for health-care coverage for trans people.

Billy Huff, a transgender man who worked at the University of Florida as the director of LGBTQ Affairs, said he was surprised when he found out about the state’s exclusion. He had only researched Aetna to find out if he had coverage.

“I was heartbroken,” he said. “I was at that point literally marking days off on my calendar until my surgery date and already had my consultation and paid for my down payment on the surgery out-of-pocket.”

There have been other lawsuits against exceptions for gender-affirming care in state plans. In 2018, Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit against the state of Alaska on behalf of Jennifer Fletcher, a state legislative librarian, because the state prohibited coverage for her transition-related care. The LGBTQ rights-focused organization, which does litigation and public policy work, said the denial of care violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The case is still open.

Lambda Legal and the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) filed a lawsuit in 2019 on behalf of current and former employees of the state of North Carolina who were denied transition-related care under the state employee health plan. In the complaint, Lambda Legal and TLDEF argue this violates the equal protection clause, the nondiscrimination clause of Affordable Care Act, and Title IX, since the defendants include state colleges and universities.

Lambda Legal attorney Taylor Brown told Rewire.News that defense of state plan exclusions vary from arguing that the procedures aren’t medically necessary and qualify as “cosmetic” to claiming that refusing to cover gender dysphoria is not discriminatory.

“We’re doing the research about these exclusions and looking into state plans and looking into public record requests on when these decisions were made and debated, and they often rely on outdated science or just pure speculation and misinformation,” Brown said.

“Every major medical association in the United States recognizes the medical necessity of transition-related care for improving the physical and mental health of transgender people and has called for health insurance coverage for treatment of gender dysphoria,” according to the American Medical Association. The American Medical Association also cites studies showing that health coverage that includes gender-affirming care is cost-effective compared to the costs associated with untreated gender dysphoria.

Brown said the claim that refusing treatment for gender dysphoria isn’t sex discrimination doesn’t hold legal water.

“We argue that it’s sex discrimination because these procedures we call transition-related health care—they’re often procedures available to cisgender people. So they’ll say that this is not sex discrimination. It’s condition discrimination. We’re not treating gender dysphoria. But we understand that the only people who have gender dysphoria are transgender people,” she said.

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Earlier this month, a British employment judge ruled that a researcher’s anti-trans views did not constitute what’s called a protected philosophical belief under the nation’s Equality Act, which meant that her employer’s decision not to renew her contract over those views did not constitute discrimination. The woman at the center of the case, Maya Forstater, was employed on a contract basis as a tax policy researcher for the Centre for Global Development. In 2018, she began publicly campaigning, mostly on social media, against reforms to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow trans people in the United Kingdom to self-identify their gender. In response to concern from her colleagues, her employer’s human resources department warned her that others might find her anti-trans tweets “offensive and exclusionary,” and eventually declined to renew her contract. Forstater decided to sue, purporting to seek legal protection for her beliefs.

The subsequent ruling against Forstater set off a series of predictably over-the-top reactions from the self-described “gender critical feminists”—also called trans exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs—who dominate the British feminist discourse. In their framing, the case became the latest example of the so-called death of free speech and thought, the result of lefty madness and groupthink. (The author JK Rowling raised the international profile of the case—and was also heavily criticized—after tweeting support for Forstater.)

But a closer look at the case reveals that it doesn’t have much to do with a belief that “there are only two sexes in human beings… male and female,” as Forstater claims (and growing bodies of science dispute). In practice, Forstater was seeking legal cover to disregard the already established rights of trans people in the U.K. Hers was a familiar argument—one that for too long has dominated mainstream coverage of trans rights.

A passage from employment judge James Tayler’s ruling explained it perfectly: “The claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.” Forstater, in her witness statement, more or less confirmed this: It “may be polite,” she acknowledged, to use a person’s preferred pronouns, “but there is no fundamental right to compel people to be polite or kind in every situation.”

Forstater’s claim about protected belief was just a smokescreen for her underlying bigotry, and Tayler saw through it. “It is also a slight of hand to suggest that the Claimant merely does not hold the belief that transwomen are women,” he wrote in his judgment. “She positively believes that they are men; and will say so whenever she wishes.” The case, then, wasn’t so much about belief as it was about actions.

In the U.K., trans people are protected on the basis of their “gender reassignment,” meaning that they should be treated as their transitioned genders under the law. In her employment case, Forstater wanted her own beliefs to supersede the rights of those trans people. Winning her suit would have meant potentially nullifying protections for trans people and eroding emerging social norms that allow trans people to feel safe and respected in basic social interactions.

Anti-trans activists like Forstater can talk all they want about their simple and humble personal beliefs in the supposed immutability of biological sex, but the truth is, as the judge found, those views are—or should be—irrelevant to how trans people are treated in society and on the job.

Trans people are only all too aware of their own assigned sex. Many, like me, have taken hormones and had surgery to change the sexed traits of the body we are born with. But there are no names or pronouns carved into our chromosomes. It doesn’t matter what Forstater believes about trans people or the body—the court found that it didn’t entitle her to misgender people. That’s why non-discrimination laws exist in the first place.

People like Forstater focus on biological sex because that is precisely the axis upon which trans people are othered, but where is the limit on this proposed legal right? Conservative ideologies around biological sex already hurt people in their places of work. The website Pregnant Then Screwed lists hundreds of individual stories of mostly British women who were fired or marginalized from their job because they gave birth or became pregnant. The law, rightly, now works to protect against this. Trans people are entitled to that same dignity. Had Forstater won, it’s possible that her case could have opened the legal door for all kinds of sinister but “sincerely held” beliefs to reign over workplaces in the U.K.

Judge Tayler rightly anticipated the danger: He explained that under British law, religious beliefs and lack of religious beliefs are protected, so a Catholic’s beliefs would see the same protection as an atheist’s. Philosophical belief works in a similar legal fashion. In determining whether a claimant’s beliefs are worthy of protection under British law, it must pass through the Grainger criteria, named after a case which determined belief in climate change to be a protected belief.

The Grainger criteria consists of several legal tests for philosophical beliefs: “the belief must be genuinely held; it must be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available; it must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behavior; it must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance; and it must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not be incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

Tayler held that Forstater’s belief about biological sex failed to meet the final requirement—that it not be incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

Cases like this—which pit the actual lives of trans people against the beliefs of somebody who decided to test her colleagues’ patience by posting over 150 anti-trans tweets in a single week—are a win-win for anti-trans activists. If they prevail, they now have a new legal basis to treat trans people like garbage without reprisal. If they lose, they can bang on about how trans people are spreading a totalitarian belief system that crushes anyone who might disagree.

That’s why it’s frustrating to watch these developments as a trans person. This woman is not trans, the judge is not trans, the media now disseminating information about the case is largely not trans, JK Rowling is not trans. But now it’s trans people taking the blow online and in the media.

Commonly held beliefs don’t develop in a vacuum. Trans people have never had control over their own narrative, in science or in media. That has started to change recently, but by and large cis people still hold the power to frame trans lives for the masses. Maintaining that power to define trans lives is what ultimately drives anti-trans activists, not only in their online presence but in the courts and more broadly.

As the case leads us into a new decade, it’s an example of trans people finally finding a tiny foothold in the story of our own lives and bodies. Tayler’s judgment recognizes that hard-earned, long-fought achievement. So does the backlash.

The post When “Biology” Becomes a Cover for Anti-Trans Bigotry appeared first on MyMedicPlus.

Working in partnership with its newest physician, Dr. Barbara Kilian, Mendocino Coast Clinics (MCC) is starting a new service called “Open Door” to reach out to the LGBTQ and sex positive community. Dr. Kilian is spearheading the effort, which will open starting one day a week in July.

“Many people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and sex positive community face discrimination in many areas of their lives, including healthcare,” she said. Sex positive is a term used to describe a tolerant or progressive attitude towards sex and sexuality, one that does not discriminate against non-traditional relationships and behaviors such as open relationships, kink, fetishes, and erotic practices or role-playing involving bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism. Also, some people are asexual.

Dr. Kilian explained that people in these minority groups (LGBTQ/sex positive/asexual) who need healthcare are in an even more vulnerable position than most people who need healthcare because they fear they will be judged or face prejudice. When people feel uncomfortable or embarrassed in a healthcare setting, they may not be forthcoming about their symptoms or concerns; some choose to forego care altogether to avoid this situation.

“This is especially dangerous for LGBTQ teens who have a higher-than-average suicide rate,” Dr. Kilian said. “And I know trans people who say they would rather die—literally—than go to a hospital emergency department and be treated as ‘less than.’” She says all people deserve a safe place to receive healthcare, and she intends to create just such a place on the Mendocino Coast.

Open Door @ MCC will be centered around sexual health, but it will also be a place where people in LGBTQ and sex positive people can come to be referred for other types of medical and behavioral health care. “We’ll be a safe place to start and either we’ll be equipped to provide the care directly or we’ll refer patients to providers who have been vetted, who we know are welcoming and well-versed in LGBTQ and sex positive issues,” she said. For example, Dr. Kilian plans to offer the initial screening for gender reassignment surgery. If patients decide to pursue surgery, Dr. Kilian will refer them to a transgender-friendly doctor. If a teen patient comes in and needs gynecological care, Dr. Kilian will work with Blue Door @ MCC to make sure the teen feels safe and comfortable with their medical provider.

Before moving to Fort Bragg, Dr. Kilian worked as an emergency room doctor and ran a small sex positive practice in San Francisco. Open Door @ MCC will begin seeing patients one day a week beginning in July and will expand its hours as the demand for services grows. For more information, call (707) 964-1251 and ask for Dr. Kilian.

MCC is a local, non-profit, federally qualified health center offering medical, dental and behavioral health care to people in the coastal communities of Mendocino County.

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Sex Reassignment Surgery Market size is set to exceed USD 968 Million by 2024; according to a new research study published by Global Market Insights, Inc. The transgender healthcare concern is rising and experiencing considerable surge in interest from several healthcare providers and policy makers. Presence of favorable government policies such as The Affordable Care Act in the country prevents most of the health insurers from discriminating transgenders from other country population. Hence, presence of favorable policies from the U.S. government for patients opting or undergoing gender reassignment surgeries will expand the business growth in the forthcoming years.

Increase in number of sex regret incidence among the people that have already undergone the gender reassignment surgical procedure will be one of the major market impeding factor. According to the recent survey it was observed that the number of patients that regretted sex change surgeries was high among the biologic males that underwent operations and the rate has been increasing in the last few years.

The number of transgender and intersex people opting for sex change surgical procedures across the globe is on rise, especially in the developed regions of United States. There has been a surge in the patients wanting to change their sex from male to female or vice versa, increasing nearly fourfold in the last decade boosting the demand for sex reassignment surgical procedures.

Male to female gender reassignment surgery market is estimated to witness considerable amount of growth at a CAGR of 25.7% over the forecast timeframe. In the U.S., male to female surgical procedures are on rise and increased from 1,380 surgical procedures in 2015 to around 1,876 in 2016. According to the surgeons, male to female surgical procedures are less complicated as compared to that of the female to male procedures hence, male to female gender reassignment surgery market will grow in the forthcoming years.

U.S. dominated the North America sex reassignment surgery market and valued at USD 97.23 million in 2017. According to The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), plastic surgeons in the U.S. performed more than 3,250 sex change operations in the year 2016, increasing by almost 19% as compared to the number of surgical procedures carried out previous year. Increase in insurance support along with rise in awareness and social acceptance will escalate the demand for sex change surgeries will only rise over the coming years.

UK sex reassignment surgery market is estimated to witness a sharp rise at a CAGR of 25.1% over the forecast period. The recent statistics have suggested that sex change surgeries have seen demand shoot up drastically over the past few years. Increase in number of surgical procedures in the country along with favorable polices provided by the NHS will lead to growing demand for sex change surgery.

Some of the leading players in the sex reassignment surgery market include Mount Sinai Centre for Transgender Medicine and Surgery (CTMS), Transgender Surgery Institute of Southern California, Rumercosmetics, Chettawut Plastic Surgery centre, Phuket International Aesthetic Centre (PIAC), Sava Perovic Foundation Surgery, Yeson Voice centre, Bupa Cromwell Hospital. These service providers focus on conducting complicated gender reassignment surgical procedure and provide necessary advanced care to the patients and hence attract more customers from various different regions.

Sex reassignment surgery market research report includes in-depth coverage of the industry with estimates & forecast in terms of revenue in USD million from 2013 to 2024, for the following segments:

Sex Reassignment Surgery Market by Gender transition

Male to female
Facial
Breast
Genital
Phallectomy
Orchiectomy
Vaginoplasty
Female to male
Facial
Chest
Genital
Hysterectomy
Phalloplasty
The above information is provided for the following regions/countries:

North America
U.S.
Canada
Europe
Germany
UK
France
Spain
Italy
Serbia
Asia Pacific
China
India
Japan
Australia
Thailand
Latin America
Brazil
Mexico
Middle East and Africa
South Africa
Saudi Arabia

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