PHOENIX (LifeSiteNews) — The Arizona Senate’s Health & Human Services Committee (HHS) voted 5-2 on Tuesday to advance legislation to require any health provider or insurance plan that covers gender “transition” procedures also provide or insure detransitioning services for those who wish to return to living as their actual sex.
SB1511 states that “any contract” for health insurance “that provides coverage for gender transition procedures may not deny coverage for gender detransition procedures”; and that any “physician, health care institution or other person or entity” providing health care that “performs gender transition procedures must agree to provide or pay for” the same for detransitioning.
The legislation also requires insurers to submit anonymized data to the state regarding the number, ages, and sexes of those seeking to detransition, so the state can report to the public how many people ultimately come to regret their “transitions.” Lastly, it provides for an “expedited procedure” for detransitioners to reestablish their original names and genuine sexes on drivers’ licenses and other identifying documents.
If enacted, the proposed law would take effect at the beginning of 2025. However, while Republicans control both chambers of the Arizona legislature, SB1511 is expected to be vetoed by left-wing Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs, and the GOP lacks the votes to force an override.
Testifying in support of the measure was Chloe Cole, a young woman who shared her story of first thinking she was a boy at age 12, being given puberty blockers and testosterone injections at 13, and having her breasts removed at 15 – all thanks in large part to medical professionals who pressured her parents into affirming her gender confusion with insinuations that she would otherwise kill herself.
At 16, Cole came to regret her path, found the doctors who had pushed her onto it largely unwilling to help her change course, and for years has been publicly speaking out against the damage done by the “transition” lobby and its dominance of the medical establishment as one of numerous “detransitioners” typically ignored by the corporate press.
I go to doctors for help in detransitioning, they see the damage that has been done to me, they throw up their hands and shrug.
Every detransitioner that I know has faced this reality.
In many states, insurers are required to pay for transition, but no such law exists for… pic.twitter.com/4DYQFmkeZr
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) February 14, 2024
Cole told the lawmakers that she remains a “damaged woman without breasts, with a damaged sexuality, and with complications that persist years” after halting her “transition,” which drives her to try to “save even one life from what I experienced.”
“In the power of these reforms, an entire patient population today, right now, falling through the cracks of American health care may be saved,” she said. “The timing could not be more critical. An exponential growth amongst those entering the transition pipeline will inevitably be reflected in those who desist in transition – all we should expect will require lifelong medicalization.”
SB1511 was introduced by Republican State Sen. Janae Shamp, a former operating room nurse. “My heart goes out to the growing number of people, especially children, like Chloe was, struggling with their identity, who were pushed toward physically altering their bodies as a solution, rather than receiving the mental health care they deserve,” Shamp said, AZ Free News reports.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Last summer, the Biden administration’s own U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report that acknowledged “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
Some physicians heavily involved in “transitioning” minors have been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an exposé last year about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”