City Employees Barking Up the Wrong Tree in San Francisco, But City Hears Their . . . Um . . . Bark

In which we consider whether satisfying the demands of psychologically damaged City employees for publicly funded physical mutilations really can be considered an obligation of guaranteeing civil rights.

Francis of Assisi, it is said, had a special affinity for all of God's creatures, even the ones we commonly think of as brute beasts. It is for this reason, and this one only, that the left coast city on the bay can be thought of as properly named. After all, as it has demonstrated in its most recent municipal action, the City of San Francisco is a repository for brute beasts, and has a long-proven commitment to promotion and preservation of the perverse and bizarre.

In case you had not heard the news, the City of San Francisco has decided to make a series of improvements to the health care insurance program it offers to City employees. After pay increases, most employees in both the public and private sectors look for improvements in their health care insurance package as a means of fulfilling expectations regarding the rewards of faithful labor. Among the improvements, the City has announced that it will include hearing aids, expanded coverage of acupuncture treatment, expanded mental health treatment coverage, chemical dependency treatment, and annual eye exams. So far, so good.

Tucked into the legislation, however, is a provision requiring the City's health benefits plan to cover most costs related to so-called "gender reassignment" surgery, or GRAS. GRAS refers to any of several surgical techniques intended to mutilate the distinctive male or female features of the human body. GRAS also refers to subsequent surgical mutilations designed to create pseudo-organs mimicking such features. GRAS ranges in cost from $ 40,000.00 to nearly $ 80,000.00. Under the plan approved by the Health Services Board, a lifetime benefit maximum of $ 50,000.00 would be imposed.

A candidate for GRAS typically operates under a mental or emotional defect that leads the candidate to believe that he or she was born into a body of the wrong gender. The City's amended health plan will also provide coverage for counseling, and for hormone treatments that typically precede GRAS, and, if the illusion of gender change is to be maintained, must typically be continued indefinitely.

Supporters of coverage for GRAS, and for related counseling and hormone treatments apparently view the struggle for City-mandated medical benefits as a civil rights struggle. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle carries the following remark by City Supervisor Mark Leno: "This is very much a civil rights issue. . . . . This is about equal benefits for equal work." There has been no word from America's premier civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, regarding their reaction to this startling "civil rights" "victory."

Truthserum, however, has a few thoughts on the subject. The bizarre observation by Supervisor Leno must be scrutinized. When examined in the light of day, neither the invocation of civil rights nor the plan to expand benefits is sensible.

Remember, "equal benefits for equal work." The principle of equality seems ruggedly built; designed "Ford-tough," as it were, in order to carry a lot of baggage in any effort at serious manipulations of society. Who can forget the plaintive cry of Lucy van Pelt, "all I want is my fair share! all I want is what I have coming to me!" It is doubtful, however, that "equality" is built tough enough to succeed as a justification for San Francisco's innovation. Supervisor Leno's remark invites the question, what has the City of San Francisco done to put itself in the position in which it can be said to owe genital mutilation to any of its employees to prove its commitment to equality?

In what sense was there any inequality in the program prior to this machination? Did the City require its health benefits plan to expend funds assisting city employees in retaining their gender? Has there been a mysterious rash of cases in which male and female employees required surgery to remain male or female? To state the proposition is to deflate it. There was no "equality" problem with the plan, prior to the amendment, because all the procedures, treatments, medications, and other benefits available under the plan were equally available to the gender certain and the gender confused.

The more likely source of alleged inequality is the availability of health benefits coverage for other surgical procedures.

For example, GRAS may be viewed by those who believe that they need it as the equivalent of an emergency appendectomy, or heart catheterization to relieve a cardiovascular blockage. Again, to state the proposition is to deflate it. (Again, a bizarre and unfounded notion.) But both GRAS candidates and those employees who are not suffering from mental or emotional defects regarding self-perception of gender may become candidates for a life-saving catheterization or appendectomy. The City's health benefits plan does not deny coverage of such life-saving procedures to those employees who are confused about their gender. If it did, then the cure for that inequality would be to require the City to pay for life-saving surgery without discriminating against such procedures on the basis of confusion over gender.

Clearly, Supervisor Leno offers no substantive justification for the bizarre program expansion. But what about his claim that funding GRAS and related services was a civil rights issue? The assertion means nothing less than this: a city that refuses to fund GRAS is the moral equivalent of a city that refused to hire or promote African Americans because of their skin color. It is worth noting, however, that the City has more than a couple of dozen employees that might take advantage of the new "benefit." That fact dispels any comparison with the civil rights movement of the '50's and '60's; then, African Americans were struggling for equal opportunities in employment, housing, and benefits--an equality that had been withheld from them because of their skin color for generations. In San Francisco, however, the gender confused do not suffer from any difficulty in obtaining City employment.

Truthserum suspects that Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hosea Williams all are spinning in their graves at Supervisor's Leno's attempt to steal the fire and thunder of the civil rights movement to dress up the City's affinity for perversity. Civil rights means nothing, if it can mean that a city must pay, with the collective support of other employees, for any medically unnecessary nip and tuck, and especially ones that mutilate the body.

Of course, if city funded GRAS surgery is a question of civil rights, Truthserum looks next for yet another much-maligned minority to speak up in support of its rights: victims of transspeciation. Admittedly, not ever species reassignment surgery is likely to result in a transformed but still employable city employee. But Truthserum cannot help but wonder when one of San Francisco's K-9 cops might demand "equal benefits for equal work."

Truthserum
thetruthserum@yahoo.com

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