More conflicts to come?

Potential conflicts between religious institutions and mandated health coverage are not limited to the area of reproductive rights.  The Washington Post, for example, reports on a growing area of clinical medicine:

A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics. . . .

Discussing one particular case, the article recounts:

Private schools refused to enroll him as a boy, and the family’s pediatrician refused to go along with their request to treat him like a boy. They found a physician who would, Dr. Jo Olson, medical director of a transgender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Olson said the journal reports should help persuade more doctors to offer these kids sex-changing treatment or refer them to specialists who will. “It would be so nice to move this out of the world of mental health, and into the medical world,” Olson said.