EdgeBoston.com – by Ethan Jacobs – Bay Windows
Experts at tax trial explain gender identity disorder
Attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) spent the second day of a trial in which a transwoman is suing the federal agency for the right to deduct her medical expenses related to treatment for Gender Identity Disorder (GID) trying to make the case that sex-reassignment surgery is a cosmetic procedure rather than a medical necessity. IRS senior attorney John Mikalchus grilled Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders? (GLAD) expert witness, psychiatrist Dr. George Brown, for more than four hours about the medical necessity of sex-reassignment surgery and other treatments for GID, asking him on multiple occasions to concede that the procedures are cosmetic. Brown, a psychology professor at East Tennessee State University and a board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which issues the internationally recognized standards of care for GID treatment, refused to do so, but Mikalchus tried to hammer home that point himself. Mikalchus also suggested that surgery, hormones and other treatments for GID do not cure patients? cross-gender identification but merely reinforce it, and he said that the treatments for GID are an anomaly in the mental health profession.