TheChronicleHerald.ca – By David Jackson – Provincial Reporter
Liberals think the province should be paying for sex-change operations, but party leader Stephen McNeil said the policy is on the back burner.
After a lively half-hour debate Sunday morning, Grits voted 80 to 48 in support of a resolution calling for the province to pay for transsexuals’ gender-reassignment surgery. Young Liberal Neil MacIsaac, whose group moved the resolution, said transsexualism is a congenital birth condition in which someone is trapped in the body of the opposite gender.
He said such people are prone to depression and one in five attempt suicide. He estimated the cost of providing operations for the roughly 47 transsexuals in Nova Scotia at about $1.2 million.