Brown University to pay for students' sex change procedures

by Kirsten Andersen

PROVIDENCE, February 8, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Students at Brown University who decide they want to live as the opposite sex will now be covered under the school’s student health insurance plan.

Starting in August, Brown’s student health insurance plan will pay for more than a dozen different sexual reassignment surgery procedures, including scrotoplasty, labiaplasty, clitoroplasty, and placement of testicular prostheses, reports The Brown Daily Herald.

“We identified this as an important benefit for students to have access to,” Director of Insurance and Purchasing Services Jeanne Hebert wrote in an e-mail to the Daily Herald.

She said that the school-funded sex change operations were part of a broader effort “to support all students” at Brown.

The total cost for any given sexual reassignment surgery can be as much as $50,000.

Kelly Garrett, who coordinates Brown’s LGBTQ Center, said that the sexual reassignment procedures soon to be included in Brown’s student health care plan are “very standard and very comprehensive.”

Garrett said the LGBTQ Center has spent many years pressuring the university to cover the operations, as they worried that the high costs of sex change surgeries have prevented “transgender” students from seeking surgeries and hormone treatments.

“I know people where it’s taken them 10 years because they needed to save money,” she said.

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A Brown freshman who goes by “Noah” Lupica was born female, but is currently trying to change her body to appear male.

She praised the new policy, saying “the fact that Brown is now offering these surgeries is life-saving.”

According to Lupica, Brown’s insurance will cover all of the procedures she needs to start living fully as a man.