Employers Forced to Pay for Transgender Surgeries!
Employers all across Virginia could soon be forced to provide health insurance plans that cover unnecessary and harmful “transition-related care” for “transgender individuals” who seek to physically alter their bodies to more closely resemble the opposite sex. This would include “hormone replacement therapy” and even “gender reassignment surgeries” to mutilate or remove perfectly healthy body parts, and would be made available to both adults and children!
Tonight, a Senate committee passed HB 1429 (D-Roem) to do just that, as they ignored legitimate concerns raised by our team. Now the bill heads to the full Senate for a vote.
Contact Your Senator Today and Tell Them to OPPOSE HB 1429!
Additionally, this radical bill dramatically expands upon the standard claim of “gender identity” (which claims that a person can change from male to female, or vice versa) to now define it as “an individual's internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.” This bill allows anyone to identify as part male and part female (of presumably any ratio), or even some unspecified third option entirely! Meanwhile, it remains completely unknown what any of that even means or what it implies about how such persons must now be accommodated.
Furthermore, in the same way SB 868 (D- Ebbin) and HB 1663 (D-Sickles) add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to nondiscrimination laws without serious protections for churches and religious schools, HB 1429 will force many employers to provide a healthcare plan against their convictions with NO religious exemption.
With this bill, the ideological Left continues its assault on religious freedom by forcing employers who provides health insurance to include coverage for treatments and surgeries that may directly conflict with their common-sense knowledge and convictions about human biology and sexuality – and seriously harms confused children and adults with medically unnecessary procedures!
HB 1429 also requires all health plan carriers to “treat covered individuals consistent with their gender identity.” (Totally unclear how this applies to the new “gender identities” mentioned above) Then, in the very next line of the bill, it prohibits the denial of medical exams and procedures to a “transgender individual” that are otherwise exclusively offered to persons of one biological sex – which may be different from the gender identity that person is claiming to be! Hence we see, even in the face of complete contradictions, biology always shines through in reality.
The bill will also force coverage of “reassignment surgeries,” something that many within the medical community do not agree with. Dr. Paul McHugh, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, stated in a brief with the Supreme Court on that “those who are affirmed in their gender beliefs progress from social transition to surgical interventions at their peril. Indeed, if the evidence shows us anything, it indicates that those who progress all the way through surgery fare poorly.”
This bill not only imposes on an employer’s ability to provide insurance coverage that meets the basic health needs of their employees and potentially conflicts with their deeply-held convictions, but it also undermines the free market system that allows employers to determine the kind of coverage they want to provide to their employees as an added benefit of employment.
Please Contact Your Senator Today and Tell Them to OPPOSE HB 1429!
