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Oregon Bill Would Require Insurers to Cover Sex Changes, Not Detransitions

It also would allow abortions, transgender modifications for minors without parental consent and make the state a gender-surgery sanctuary for children

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Oregon Bill Would Require Insurers to Cover Sex Changes, Not Detransitions
The Oregon State Capitol building in Salem, circa 1960. Photo by Harvey Meston/Archive Photos/Getty Images
By Jackson Elliott
5/15/2023Updated: 5/17/2023
0:00

A proposal in Oregon that would require insurance coverage for transgender changes without requiring coverage for those who change their minds to “detransition” has outraged some state lawmakers.

Even more upsetting to the lawmakers is that the measure would allow children to “transition” without requiring parental knowledge and consent.

Oregon House Bill 2002 has been approved by the state House and is now under consideration by the state Senate, where Republican lawmakers have walked out in an attempt to prevent its passage, according to state Rep. Ed Diehl, a Republican.

“I’ve got transgender people who think it’s crazy what we’re doing to kids” who aren’t happy with their biological sex and want to make an aesthetic change, Diehl said.

“Lesbians, gay men, just hardcore leftists—these are all Oregonians. And they’re saying this is crazy. This makes no sense to be doing this to our children.”

If enacted, the measure would allow abortion for children of any age without parental knowledge and also make Oregon a sex-change surgery sanctuary state for minors.

Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl. (Courtesy of Rep. Ed Diehl)
Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl. Courtesy of Rep. Ed Diehl

“They could have written this so many different ways to acknowledge what parents believe they have a constitutional right for, which is to direct the care and upbringing of their child,” Diehl told The Epoch Times. “But they wrote it without any consideration of that at all.”

The proposal states that “gender-affirming treatment” means a “procedure, service, drug, device, or product that a physical or behavioral health care provider prescribes to treat” when a person’s “gender identity” and “sex assignment at birth” are different.

The bill mandates that health benefit plans may not “deny or limit coverage” for “gender-affirming treatment.” However, the bill’s text doesn’t mandate coverage for people who want to undo their sex-change surgeries and treatments.

“The bill, the way it’s written, is very clear” that it doesn’t mandate that kind of coverage, Diehl said.

Meaningless Definition

Because of that, Diehl asked in April for an amendment to the bill.

In response, the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services sent him a letter saying that Oregon law defines “gender identity” as “an individual’s gender-related identity, appearance, expression or behavior, regardless of whether the identity, appearance, expression or behavior differs from that associated with the gender assigned to the individual at birth.”

Diehl posted the relevant chapter of law on Twitter and asked, “If your ‘gender-related identity’ is male, and your ‘appearance’ is female, what is your ‘gender identity’?”

The definition is so broad, it’s meaningless, he said.

“In one case, they’re saying the incongruence is between how you feel and your biology,” Diehl said. “And in the other case, the incongruence is between how you appear and your biology.”

Detransitioner advocates protest outside of the annual Pediatric Endocrine Society conference held in San Diego on May 6, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Detransitioner advocates protest outside of the annual Pediatric Endocrine Society conference held in San Diego on May 6, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

He proposed an amendment to the bill covering health care for detransitioners, but House Democrats voted it down, he said. committee chair Rep. Rob Nosse, a Democrat, also opposed the measure, according to Diehl.

“The chair told me, ‘My people don’t like this. It’s very controversial. I don’t want you to bring it up,’” Diehl said.

Parental Notification

On transgenderism and abortion, HB 2002 puts parents out of the loop, Diehl said.

“A minor of any age may give consent, without the consent of a parent or guardian of the minor, to receive reproductive health care information and services,” the bill reads.

The bill suggests that children as young as 15 could choose to be sterilized.

“‘Reproductive health care’ does not include the voluntary sterilization of a minor under 15 years of age,” the bill reads.

The bill is especially troubling because it may help cloak sex trafficking or other sexual abuse, Diehl said. Most 10-year-old girls aren’t getting pregnant because they’re interested in having sex, he said.

“Let’s say you’re a young girl—you’re being trafficked and sexually abused [and] your abuser brings you in and tells you, ‘Tell them exactly what they want to hear, [that] my 14-year-old boyfriend got me pregnant.’ And they go in, and they have an abortion,” he said.

Nothing in the bill requires an investigation if a very young girl gets pregnant and wants an abortion, and that’s a problem, Diehl said.

HB 2002 would also allow children as young as 15 to make medical decisions on transgender surgery without parental knowledge or consent. The law would allow children to use their parents’ insurance for the procedures.

“The age of medical consent in Oregon is 15,” Diehl said. “A 15-year-old is not in a position to provide informed consent on medications and surgeries that are permanently life-altering.”

Chloe Cole speaks about detransitioning at the California State Capitol building in Sacramento on March 10, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Chloe Cole speaks about detransitioning at the California State Capitol building in Sacramento on March 10, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Finally, the bill guts parental rights in other states, he said.

If children travel to Oregon to get abortions and sex-change surgeries, the bill protects doctors who do the procedures from prosecution under the laws of other states.

Transitions Funded by Taxpayers

The Oregon Health Authority reported that 7,842 people have received sex-change treatments in 2022 from Medicaid insurance, paid with state and federal taxpayers’ dollars, according to an email to Diehl reviewed by The Epoch Times.

In 2022, 1,218 of those sex-change patients were younger than the age of 18. The cost of care was more than $2.3 million, an Oregon Health Authority report shows.

Protestors with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights call for unrestricted access to abortion outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on June 15, 2022. (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)
Protestors with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights call for unrestricted access to abortion outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on June 15, 2022. Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times

There’s one place that the bill offers parents the ability to do whatever they want, Diehl said.

Currently, it’s a crime in Oregon to conceal “the corpse of a newborn child with intent to conceal the fact of its birth or to prevent a determination of whether it was born dead or alive,” according to an existing state law.
HB 2002 would remove that language, making it so concealing an infant’s death wouldn’t be a crime.

Partisan Battle

Of 37 Democrats in the state House, 22 sponsored the bill, while all 17 Democrats in the Senate sponsored the proposal. But Republican senators are trying to stop its passage.

Oregon’s legislative bodies require two-thirds of their members to be present for legislation to be approved. So to block a vote, Republicans walked out of the state Senate on May 3, Diehl said.

Fourteen days later, 12 Republican senators have refused to return to the chamber, putting all legislative business on hold.

At a press conference on May 4, the Republican lawmakers said they walked out because HB 2002 isn’t written at an eighth-grade reading level—a requirement of all Oregon laws.

“Unfortunately, what has happened is the law that passed in 1979, at some point stopped being followed,” Sen. Tim Knopp, a Republican and the state Senate minority leader, said at a press conference. “Not following a law is not an excuse for continuing to break the law.”

Knopp didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

While most Oregon laws fail to pass that readability test, Diehl said, the boycott is about stopping HB 2002.

Jackson Elliott
Jackson Elliott
Author
Jackson Elliott is a former reporter for The Epoch Times.
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