Tag: Oregon

There has been a slew of stories lately on the medical front concerning treatment of transgender people by medical professionals, emanating from Ohio, Washington, Oregon, California and Massachusetts.

To quote one of the authors of the pieces I shall link to:

There has been a long history of lack of access to basic healthcare and systematic discrimination for transgender people.

–Pat Magee, MSW, for Rage Monthly

Seven stories on the other side.

Alec Esquivel, 42, is an Oregon transman.  He works as a law clerk for the Oregon Court of Appeals.  Alec’s doctors said it was a medically necessary procedure to have a hysterectomy because of his heightened risk of ovarian and uterine cancer due to the hormone therapy he began in 2001.  Providence Health Plans, third-party insurance administrator for the state, and the Public Employees Benefit Board denied coverage for the procedure, stating

services related to a sex-change operation, including evaluation, surgery and follow-up services are not a covered benefit of your plan.

Alec is therefore suing the state of Oregon and the PEBB to cover his medical care related to the hysterectomy as well as $250,000 in damages and attorney fees.

Alec Esquivel was denied coverage for a medically necessary procedure specifically because he is transgender. This type of discrimination is unlawful and risks the health of hardworking, productive citizens of Oregon.

—Dru Levasseur, Lambda Legal transgender rights attorney

Last week I prepared an essay about LGBT aging, entitled Avoiding becoming part of Gen Silent.  Tonight’s dairy continues on that theme.

Interspersed with some other news about LGBT seniors will be some videos of some of us.  History has proved that the way to get people interested in a cause is to put faces on the cause.

So the diary is video-heavy.  Be forewarned.  I divided the different stories, which come from Portland, New York City, San Diego, Philadelphia and Iowa City, from each other by use of the videos.

“Oregon is a very poor state with the 2nd highest unemployment in the coutry,” said the man I met at the Explosible Man’s demo.  Most of the state – my part of the state, it seemed was filled with ignorant wingers.  Only Portland and surroundings was blue territory.

The Explosible Man, Dr. James McNight, was demoing and providing lectures on a fantastical new green energy taking dead center aim at the lethal fossil fuel, natural gas, pushed most persuasively by supereme con artist T. Boone Pickens to easy marks like Nancy Pelosi.  Nancy has decreed that natural gas is not a fossil fuel.  She has made a hefty investment in Pickens’ wonderfully named “Clean Energy” that would convert vehicles to natural gas fueling while Boone is monopolizing an even more important liquid, water.

I have written up the magical explosible powders in the Orange Satan to the usual raging apathy for true green:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

When I took my then fiance from Portland to the Oregon Outback where I had lived and have not for over half a century, I got lost trying to find the house where I had lived the first years of my life. The house had long ago burned down and the road was no more.

We stood on a hill in waist high sagebrush overlooking a large swath of Warner Valley.  A buzzard or two circled lazily overhead and a jackrabbit scampered across the desert floor now and then.  There was not another sign of life or human habitation except a gravel road that could be seen crossing the desert.

“We lived on the other side of the draw,” I told my beloved.

She was silent for a bit with the wonder of it all.  “You lived here?” she finally managed.

Well yes.   Lived rather well even though we had no electricity.  

Got water from a hot spring.  The water was atrocious but it was at least wet.  If we had known how to use it, we could have warmed the house with it instead of using wood.

We were actually looking at a monumental ecological disaster, a monstrous crime against nature that eventually chased nearly all the Democrats of old out of the valley.

http://img693.imageshack.us/im…

The Crump Geyser, drilled by the invincible prophet of geothermal power had already become a mud puddle.

Now, a half century later, the Crump Geyser and perhaps the Hallinan Hot Spring, will be developed.  The geese are back.  In our “big city” [population ~2,000), Lakeview and smaller towns have Goose Lake back.  A small wood-burning power plant may rejuvenate an area long ago logged out.  In the Basque country of Harney County, a huge wind farm is being born.  On the coast, America’s first wave farm is under construction.

The state long ago went blue and now is the greenest state of them all, even in the Outback where once life was nearly as hard to detect as on Mars.

This country bumpkin long resident in the backward wilds of Upstate New York is thrilled for Blue Green Oregon.

Best,  Terry

Saturday morning, November 22.  Jay awakes (and refers to himself in the third person) in his tiny apartment in an inner Southeast Portland neighborhood.  Showers, dresses…tries to leave but gets sucked into 30 minutes of college football pregame shows on ESPN…breaks free eventually and throws on a jacket and a hat.

Let’s take a walk to the Portland Farmers Market at PSU, shall we?

First though, we need coffee.  Stumptown of course, mmmm!

Crossposted from La Vida Locavore, journey below the fold…