Quebec has agreed to pay for gender reassignment surgery in privately-run specialty clinics

There have been a lot of claims that the revisions to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) will affect access to gender reassignment surgery (GRS). What's happening in Quebec proves this is simply false, and that access to grs/srs is determined by politics, not by 20 people in a committee room in the United States.

Quebec has now gone from very limited publicly-funded access to SRS (half a dozen a year) to partnering with Dr. Brassard, and paying for surgeries done in his clinic, under a public-private partnership agreement through CHUM (Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal - the McGill University Health Center) and Dr Brassards Centre Métropolitain de Chirurgie Plastique (Metropolitan Centre for Plastic Surgery).

Of course, this was cause for more navel-gazing and argument within the trans community. Those of us who believe that there is a physical cause for at least some cases of transsexualism have something else to point to when family, friends, or outside critics try to drag us down (or accuse us of just being in drag).

Still, what does this discovery change in the larger context?