It's a scary time to be a trans person in the US right now. The latest and not-greatest thing is the so-called Big Beautiful Bill which scraped through the House by one vote. Among (many) other things, it would remove insurance coverage for transgender healthcare from Medicaid for all ages.
It would also remove millions of people's access to Medicaid health insurance entirely.
Dylan Scott
This is very scary. But I have a few pieces of good news.
First, cis people and rich people don't like this bill either. Even Elon and Republicans are expressing some concerns.
https://open.substack.com/pub/levremembers/p/trumps-inner-circle-collapsing-elon
This means that we have a sliver of hope that it won't pass the Senate and won't become law. I've called my Senators and made my opinion clear: will you?
Second, this bill doesn't ban healthcare providers from prescribing gender-affirming care. It just stops Medicaid from paying for that care. And, that is very bad, don't get me wrong, but it could mean that hormones or surgery billed under diagnostic codes that are not gender dysphoria could still be prescribed and covered. (Possibly, I mean, I'm not a lawyer.)
Also, trans people have been DIY’ing their access to hormones without insurance coverage for a long time. I'm not saying it's easy, just possible.
Sebastian Barr has a great essay on how to survive these attacks on trans healthcare:
https://open.substack.com/pub/sebastianmbarr/p/i-believe-you-can-survive-the-most
I think we need to express a full range of emotions to survive and thrive despite these and other legal challenges.
