Health Minister Ron Liepert caught about a dozen transsexual protesters off guard when he announced that he didn’t think it was fair to strand people who had been preparing for years to have a sex change.

So 28 people who are in varying stages of the sex change procedure will get funding to finish their surgeries, while 20 others who have been paying for hormone treatments in advance of the surgery will also get government funding, said Liepert.

“It would not be right for us to say, `Well, you spent all this money, but we’re now going to change the rules,”’ the minister later told reporters.

Jamie-Lynn Garvin, 47, who has been involved in the sex change process for more than three years, was shocked by the minister’s announcement.

“It’s a $40,000 announcement for me,” said Garvin. “But I’ve heard a lot of things come out of politicians’ mouths and I don’t know if this is true or not.”

But Liepert’s motives were being interpreted in a very different light by a group preparing to file a human rights complaint Wednesday in hopes of blocking the decision in the recent Alberta budget to end funding for sex changes.

Jordenne Prescott said the Ontario government’s 1998 decision to eliminate funding for sex changes was overturned by the province’s human rights commission.

They were hoping to use this as a precedent in the Alberta human rights case. But a key factor in the Ontario ruling was the fact that people who had been preparing for a sex change were left stranded.

Liepert has now “grandfathered” most Albertans waiting for sex change procedures, so those behind the Alberta human rights complaint may no longer be able to use the Ontario ruling as a precedent.

“Essentially, it was a very smart move on his part,” said Prescott, who is among those waiting for a sex change. “It does not gut the complaint entirely, though.”

Kristopher Wells, a researcher with the Institute for Sexual Minorities Studies and Services at the University of Alberta, said the complaint will now argue that Alberta’s funding cut is simply discriminatory.

“People in the community may also seek a civil injunction against the government until the courts rule whether this was a discriminatory action or not,” said Wells.

There has also been talk in Alberta’s transgendered community of a class-action lawsuit claiming damages for the lost government funding, he said.

Liepert explained that he decided to approve additional sex-change funding after hearing media reports about the impact the cut would have on people who have spent years preparing for the procedure.

“That decision seemed to be the right one to make and I made it today,” he said.

But the minister could not say how much these additional surgeries would cost, but the price of a sex change usually ranges from $17,000 to $70,000.

Eleven states that once required special consent for HIV testing have changed their laws, a key step to making an HIV test part of the standard battery that patients expect.

But HIV specialists meeting Thursday said other barriers include physician confusion about the ease of today’s rapid tests, which can cost as little as $15 – although many patients seem to accept them.

No more than 100 of the nation’s 5,000 emergency rooms routinely test for HIV in patients who aren’t critically ill, said Dr. John Bartlett of Johns Hopkins University, who co-chaired the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research meeting. Yet because so many HIV patients are poor or uninsured, ERs are the health-care setting most likely to find them.

And while every pregnant woman is supposed to be tested so steps can be taken to protect her unborn baby, about 40 percent aren’t, he added.

“Those are what we call missed opportunities,” Bartlett said. Today, the test is “much better, it’s much easier, it’s much cheaper. The treatment is really great now.”

Just over 1.1 million Americans are estimated to have HIV and 232,000 don’t know it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC for years recommended routine testing mainly for people at high-risk, such as intravenous drug users. Then, finally, came drugs potent enough to keep HIV patients healthy for years, postponing the slide into full-blown AIDS. Yet nearly half of new infections still were being discovered too late for patients to benefit. Not to mention that people who don’t know they’re infected unwittingly spread the virus.

So in September 2006, the CDC recommended routine testing for everyone ages 13 to 64, whether they think they’re at risk for HIV or not.

There is no nationwide data yet on the new guidelines’ impact, CDC’s Dr. Bernard Branson told The Associated Press.

But Branson listed encouraging signs:

-New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, the nation’s largest municipal health system, has nearly tripled HIV testing – and late diagnoses dropped by about a third.

-New York’s state Medicaid program has increased testing by 30 percent.

-Early results from a federal survey suggest 2.4 million more people in 2007 said they had ever been tested for HIV than said so in 2006.

-President George W. Bush in October signed a law allowing Veterans Administration clinics to ease testing requirements.

“I don’t think anyone at CDC anticipated that we would test the whole country in a single year,” Branson said.

But in pilot projects around the country, “people are taking the recommendations to heart and implementing them as much as was feasible for them,” he added. Moreover, “we find people are very receptive to being tested, and there was concern about that before.”

Indeed, studies presented Thursday suggest more than 80 percent of emergency-room patients were amenable to an HIV test while most ER workers opposed testing them. Why? Presumably because ERs are so busy and there’s confusion about how much HIV counseling is needed.

But Bartlett demonstrated how to quickly give people a chance to either opt out or request counseling: “Mr. Jones, you’re going to have a cholesterol test, a blood count, and an HIV test – and by the way we do the HIV test on everybody because that’s what the CDC has recommended. Is there any part of this that you want more information about or you don’t want to have?”

It came during a speech at a trade union conference by another member of the House – Harriet Harman, the deputy government leader in the Commons.

Harman was taking questions and answers following a speech to union organizers in Brighton. Asked about pensions for same-sex couples under the UK’s civil partnership law, Harman revealed that Eagle and longtime partner Maria Exall, an engineer with British Telephone, will exchange vows later this month.

Journalists in the hall noted a surprised look on the faces of both Exall and Eagle. The impending ceremony was to have been a secret, known only to a select number of friends.

“I wasn’t expecting her to say this and I suspect Harriet wasn’t expecting to say it either. But it is not a state secret,” Eagle told reporters.

The couple later issued a statement saying: “Maria and I are looking forward to making our relationship official and celebrating this with our friends and family later this month.”

Eagle and Exall met 18 years ago at a Labor Party event in London.

Eagle publicly came out in 1997 in an interview with a national newspaper and has been an MP since 1992.

The civil partnership law was passed by the Labor government three years ago.

“There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children,” Ulster Democratic Unionist Party MP Iris Robinson said during a debate in the House.

Then in a radio interview, Robinson said that homosexuality is “disgusting, loathsome, nauseating, wicked and vile.”

She also offered to put gays and lesbians with Dr. Paul Miller, a controversial psychiatrist who claims he can make them straight.

In addition to serving in the British Parliament, she is a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Her husband, Peter Robinson, is leader of the regional government in Northern Ireland.

The remarks drew sharp criticism from LGBT groups and other politicians in both Belfast and London. Robinson has refused to apologize, but Dr. Miller has since resigned as a part-time adviser for the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party.

Demands for a public rebuke of Robinson were posted on Brown’s Prime Ministerial Web site, growing to more than 15,000 calls for her to be censured.

But Thursday, Brown’s office said there is no provision constitutionally for the Prime Minister to rebuke a Member of Parliament.

“[Individual members] are accountable to their electorate for their own comments,” the Prime Minister’s office said in a statement.

“The government’s vision is an equal, inclusive society in Northern Ireland, where everyone is treated with respect and where opportunity for all remains a priority,” it said.