Fox News Casts Aspersions on CA Medical Care for Undocumented by Invoking Transition Treatments

Fox News put CA coverage of medical care for undocumented migrants next to Medi-Cal transition coverage and called it a news story.

by Evan Urquhart

Continuing the years long conservative tradition of making every story about the trans community, Fox News is reporting that the state of California will cover “sex changes” for illegal immigrants. But, you don’t have to take our word for it:

screenshot from Fox News

That’s right, nearly 700,000 illegal immigrants will “qualify” for what Fox has quaintly called “sex changes,” meaning any form of gender-affirming treatments or procedures. The 700,000 figure includes every undocumented migrant living in poverty in California who is becoming eligible for coverage under Medi-Cal, of whom an unknown and much smaller number would conceivably attempt to access gender-affirming treatments through the state’s low-income healthcare plan.

In the U. S. the percentage of transgender people is believed to fall between 0.5 and 1.6 percent. A representative survey conducted by the Washington Post found that only 31 percent of transgender Americans had accessed hormone treatments, and only 16 percent had accessed any form of surgery. If 1.6 percent of the 700,000 undocumented migrants are transgender this would be 11,200 Californians. If 31 percent of them seek hormone therapy, this would be fewer than 3500 people. (Hormone treatments and routine visits to monitor hormone levels are also fairly inexpensive, with many trans people choosing to pay out of pocket for privacy reasons or due to difficulty getting healthcare plans to authorize them.)

California governor Gavin Newsom has expanded coverage for the undocumented in his state several times, which has the largest number of such migrants in the U. S., although the number has fallen significantly in recent years, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. The report also claims, contrary to conservative fearmongering about a growing crisis in immigration, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U. S. peaked in 2007. The number declined or remained steady for many years, with a small uptick between 2019 and 2021 that did not bring it back up to 2007 levels.

Fox News’s gambit of sensationalizing the decision to provide health coverage for immigrants by tying it to the fact that healthcare plans in America, including Medi-Cal, routinely cover transition-related care was picked up by the Washington Examiner, who ran their own story summarizing the Fox News piece and adding the reaction of Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who emoted that Fox News’ headline was worthy of a satire site.

Undocumented immigrants are no more eligible for transition treatment than any other form of treatment. Conservatives are leveraging prejudice against the transgender community and combining it with distaste for immigrants (whether legally or illegally present in the country), to summon this notion of an undocumented migrant accessing transition.