In July 2020, YouGov released survey results on Briton’s opinions on certain trans rights issues. A plurality of Britons agreed that people should be allowed to identify as a gender different than the one they were assigned as birth, that a transgender woman is a woman, and that a transgender man is a man. Great!
The good news ends there, though. A majority opposed both allowing transgender people to change their legal gender without a doctor’s approval, and allowing them to change their legal gender without providing proof they’ve been living as their actual gender for two years. That’s an exceptionally high bar, a mandatory two years of legal frustration and compulsory outing to anyone who requires ID. Even worse: A plurality opposed allowing transgender people to use the restrooms and changing rooms that match their gender without first surgically transitioning.
While the UK gets a lot of flack for being bad about this stuff, they aren’t particularly unique. In the United States, many also feel like requiring transgender people to undergo surgical transition is a perfectly reasonable prerequisite to using their restroom of choice. It is not perfectly reasonable, but they feel like it.
The lives that transgender people live are often far from the minds of most people. When they are considered, it is often briefly, and done so with the input of almost exclusively cisgender people. Legislators are not better than the generally population in this respect. The laws that are created to regulate the transgender lives are, consequently, frequently ill-advised.
These hurdles amount to a tax on being transgender. In order to legally and socially fit in, transgender people are forced to dish out immense amounts of money.
According to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (PDF), the minimum recommended time on hormone therapy prior to having bottom surgery is one year. The cost of the surgeries and hormones can vary greatly depending on things like insurance coverage, the exact types of medication used, and the hospital’s own billing. In one transgender woman’s personal account, hormones cost $1,500 a year, while bottom surgery was in excess of $30,000. The Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery estimates that the average bottom surgery (in both directions) is only slightly cheaper, around $25,000. This is the out-of-pocket cost if they’re uninsured or their insurance won’t cover it, which is fairly common, even today. For those who are covered, the extent of the coverage is hard to predict. If you’re lucky, hormone therapy might be $10 a month, and surgery around $5,000.
This isn’t even accounting for the cost of visits to the doctor and lab tests. Specialist visits can easily cost over $40 with insurance, and are done around 4 times in the first year. If lab tests aren’t covered by insurance, then you can be looking at something in the realm of hundreds of dollars a few times in the first year.
Altogether, if you speedrun your transition to meet those legal requirements as fast as possible, and you do so as cheap as possible, you’re looking at around $6,000 dollars. Many more transgender people encounter prices more around $30,000.
That’s more than I and my significant other combined make in a year. We aren’t particularly special in this regard. The 2015 United States Trans Survey found that transgender people faced roughly three times the level of unemployment and poverty that the general population did. To impose such incredible costs on such a disadvantaged population just so they can use the restroom comfortably, or have government documents that don’t immediately out them as transgender, is obscene.