There’s not just acceptance at stake here. Medical insurance companies are not typically going to buy into a responsibility to support clients’ morphological freedom, as if medically transitioning is in the same class of thing as a cis person getting a facelift woman getting a boob job, because it is near-universally understood this is an “elective” medical procedure. But if their clients have a “condition” that requires “treatment”, well, now insurers are on the hook to pay. Public health systems operate according to similar principles, providing services to heal people of conditions deemed illnesses for free or low cost while excluding merely cosmetic medical procedures.
A lot of mental health treatment works the same way imho—people have various psychological states, many of which get inappropriately shoehorned into a pathology or illness narrative in order to get the insurance companies to pay.
All this adds a political dimension to the not inconsiderable politics of social acceptance.
There’s not just acceptance at stake here. Medical insurance companies are not typically going to buy into a responsibility to support clients’ morphological freedom, as if medically transitioning is in the same class of thing as a cis person getting a facelift
woman getting a boob job, because it is near-universally understood this is an “elective” medical procedure. But if their clients have a “condition” that requires “treatment”, well, now insurers are on the hook to pay. Public health systems operate according to similar principles, providing services to heal people of conditions deemed illnesses for free or low cost while excluding merely cosmetic medical procedures.A lot of mental health treatment works the same way imho—people have various psychological states, many of which get inappropriately shoehorned into a pathology or illness narrative in order to get the insurance companies to pay.
All this adds a political dimension to the not inconsiderable politics of social acceptance.