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The cynical rejoinder is that free money is never free. Firstly it ends up taking a huge amount of time and effort and bureaucracy to collect the money, organise its distribution, and police its usage.
But that's only the start. Soon activists will begin to protest that rich people who can pay for their own cosmetic surgery get 20k of taxpayer money, while trans people who will commit suicide without high-quality gender-affirming care get the same amount. The prices for these operations will change as the cosmetic surgeons soak up the extra funds available. It will end up in the same place as UK national insurance - means-tested to hell and back, too small to satisfy the people who want/need it and far too expensive for the people who pay for it and will never receive it.
Rather, we could just say 'No. Your morphology is your own affair. If it matters to you so much, save up and spend your own money on it'. I'm not sure how in practice your pitch appeals to those who are net taxpayers and think that transness is an unfortunate delusion.
I take the point re: the general swampy Moloch-spiral of any new government scheme - but that's a fully general argument against introducing new forms of government spending, orthogonal to the innate value of the proposal. A conversation on government bloat qua government bloat is not really the conversation I was looking to have; the policy was meant as more of a "here's how I think a sensibly run state would do it" deal than an electoral suggestion.
Well, that's where the one-size-fits-all nature of the policy comes in. As discussed in the tangent with FttG, I'd be happy expanding the scope of the policy such that it encompasses subsidies for forms of self-improvement that Red Tribers might be interested in just as well as pro-trans progressives, such as gym memberships. Besides, in the mid-to-long term, I expect genuinely attractive self-mod options not related to gender to become more and more available and popular; one (wo)man's sex surgery budget would be another man's cyborg-implant budget. Though again, I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of how to "sell" it to a partially hostile nation, just describing how I think a state populated by what I'd call reasonable people ought to do it.
I almost went on a tongue-in-cheek tangent about the fact that rationally, a random cisgender taxpayer can't be sure he or she won't have a gender epiphany in twenty years, and spending a few extra dollars in taxes on supporting the policy would therefore be insurance of sorts. I suppose that actually does raise the serious alternative option of introducing straight-up private-sector "trans insurance" separate from health insurance. Plausibly, enough affluent Blues would buy it as a virtue signal to meet demand, without touching the wallets of anyone who objects.
I don't love that option, because it bakes in gender exceptionalism, whereas an important part of my morpho-freedom-budget idea is that it would serve as a slow lead-in for broader societal acceptance of transhumanism (within which I hope and expect today's gender specific "trans movement" to ultimately dissolve). But it would probably work better than the healthcare kludge we have right now, and would presumably be more acceptable to gender-criticals, as they could keep on buying their health insurance without funding transitions.
Fair enough, if you’re interested in a ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ conversation. I’m most interested in sensory and mobility stuff - giving more senses and mobility seems to be basically a pure win with very little social upheaval required.
On the practical level, the strong tendency towards bloat means that any such measure would need to be catering to a very strong need that I regard as legitimate and hasn’t been solved any other way, but that’s another conversation.
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