This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A tiny 5.5 percent of transsexual "chest reconstruction" surgeries – radical procedures performed on healthy bodies and designed to make gender-confused people feel and look more like their opposite-sex "gender identity" – were "self-paid" by the individuals themselves, a new study has found.

Conversely, nearly 31 percent of those same surgeries were paid for by government health insurance, and almost 60 percent were covered by private health insurance, according to the study in Aesthetic Surgery Journal, which focuses mainly on plastic surgery research.

The December 2022 study, "Nationwide Estimates of Gender-Affirming Chest Reconstruction in the United States, 2016-2019," is the largest study to date of its kind, examining an estimated 21,293 "chest reconstruction" encounters over those three years.

"Generally, most TGD [transgender and gender-diverse] patients were covered by either public or private health insurance for these procedures," it states, "representing a shift from a predominance of self-payers reported in previous studies."

The study analyzed a "weighted estimate of 21,293 encounters for [transsexual] chest reconstruction" from 2016-2019, with 17,480 persons, or 82.1%, getting "masculinizing" surgery – i.e., women having their healthy breasts surgically removed to look like a man's chest.

The study estimated that 3,813 persons, or 17.9%, sought "feminizing" procedures, which translates to a plastic surgeon inserting breast implants into a gender-confused man's body to accommodate his self-perceived "gender identity" as a "trans woman."

The study's authors listed are all affiliated with Vanderbilt University: Rishub Das, Adam Evans, Christopher Kalmar, Salam Al Kassis, Brian Drolet, and Galen Perdikis.

The almost 60% coverage by private health insurance plans for controversial procedures testifies to the immense lobbying power of LGBT activists. A two-decades-long campaign led by the leftist, LGBT group Human Rights Campaign Fund, using its skewed "Corporate Equality Index," has successfully pressured an increasing number of major corporations such as Walmart and the Walt Disney Company into providing ever more comprehensive "health" coverage for their "trans" employees, as WND and Whistleblower magazine recently reported.

The ASJ academic article was unearthed by COVID-19 "frontline doctor" Peter McCullough, who wrote about it on May 7 in his Substack, "Courageous Discourse."

Dr. McCullough, whose views on transsexual "gender surgeries" appear to be the polar opposite of the pro-trans Vanderbilt research team's, said the study indicates the number of body-mutilating procedures could be reduced if the government health insurance payments for them were removed.

"The bottom line is only 5.5% of transgender individuals pay for their cosmetic surgery, which is very different from normal male or female plastic surgery, which is almost always self-funded," McCullough writes. "Repeal of payment for gender-affirming surgeries would be expected to markedly reduce this disfiguring and unnecessary cost to the health-care system."

In the background section of the study's abstract, it states that "Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act [aka Obamacare], introduced in 2016, increased access to gender-affirming surgeries for transgender and gender diverse individuals. Masculinizing chest reconstruction (e.g., mastectomy) and feminizing chest reconstruction (e.g., augmentation mammaplasty), often outpatient procedures, are the most frequently performed gender-affirming surgeries."

The study reports that the median total charge for the "female-to-male" "masculinizing" operations is $30,537. For the "feminizing chest reconstructions," the average cost was $29,887.