The Department of Veterans Affairs for years defied a rule barring “gender alterations” to provide procedures designed to help people present as the opposite sex, internal documents obtained by The Daily Wire show.
The VA, known for providing prosthetic limbs to war heroes who suffered wounds on the battlefield, provided prosthetic penises called “3-in-1 (pee/pack/play),” as well as prosthetics designed to look like breasts, chest binders, wigs, and dilators for fake vaginas, the documents show.
Federal regulations exclude “gender alterations” from the medical services the VA is permitted to provide. But the VA interpreted that phrase narrowly, to mean only the surgeries themselves. “Since 2011, VA has provided all medically necessary transition-related care for transgender and gender diverse Veterans except surgeries,” one document said.
The Biden administration also stretched the definition of “medically necessary.” While a 2020 document said that hair removal was cosmetic and could not be covered, a document from the Biden administration taught VA staff how to pay outside providers to laser-remove the hair on a transgender person’s “face/neck, back, chest, abdomen, or genitalia,” and to record it with a vague “unlisted procedure code for skin, mucous membrane, and subcutaneous tissue.”
The VA even gave a presentation to “parking attendants or valets, maintenance staff, [and] housekeepers,” forcing them to “Articulate the key elements of VHA’s Directive on Providing Health Care for Transgender and Intersex Veterans” and training them to “ask the Veteran what name, gender, and pronoun, the Veteran prefers” so they could place them in shared hospital rooms with a member of the gender with which they identified.
The Trump administration on Monday said that, in accordance with the president’s executive order on Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, it would stop providing “medical treatments for gender dysphoria,” except for those who had already begun the treatments at the VA. In the years preceding, the Biden administration took extraordinary steps to expand the services it provided to those pursuing a gender transition.