Feds Approve and Pay For 74 Year Old Man’s Sex Change Surgery

Photo Credit: NBC News[Editor’s note: Despite the pronouns used by the author below, it was apparently a man who underwent sex change surgery at taxpayers’ expense] Denee Mallon marveled at the view of Lake Michigan from her hospital bed in the Windy City, where she had just made history: the then 74-year-old transgender woman underwent a milestone sex reassignment surgery she’d sought for decades. “Here I am, finally, after all these years,” she said. “It happened.”

Her operation will be one of the first paid for by Medicare after she won a challenge in May to end the government insurance program’s ban on covering such procedures for transgender individuals. Mallon’s victory opened the door for other seniors to access this care and may influence whether more insurers – private and public – will cover them. LGBT advocates also hailed her case as another step forward to securing equal rights for transgender people. . .

The Medicare ban was imposed in 1989, stemming from earlier information years before that found there was a “lack of well controlled, long-term studies of the safety and effectiveness of the surgical procedures and attendant therapies.” It deemed such treatment “experimental” and noted a “high rate of serious complications”. . .

The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association are among the professional medical groups that have in the last decade endorsed sex reassignment surgery, which can include a number of procedures such as a complete hysterectomy, bilateral mastectomy and genital reconstruction. (Read more about the sex change surgery HERE)

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