Transgender Employees Sue U. Wisconsin for Dropping Coverage of Sex Reassignment Procedures
“discrimination based on sex and transgender status”
It’s amazing that less than a decade ago, this wouldn’t even be an issue.
The Associated Press reports via the Star Tribune:
Transgender university employees sue over insurance cuts
Two transgender University of Wisconsin employees are suing the state’s insurance board and the UW System after it stopped covering sex reassignment procedures.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Wisconsin on Friday filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of anthropology graduate student Alina Boyden and cancer researcher Shannon Andrews.
The plaintiffs, who both identify as female and receive health insurance through their jobs with the university in Madison, argue that their insurance unfairly deprives them of care for gender dysphoria, a documented medical condition in which a person feels trapped in the body of the wrong sex. They allege not providing the benefits amounts to discrimination based on sex and transgender status.
“Too many transgender people continue to face discrimination in all facets of life, including health care access, and so I felt compelled to stand up and try to do something about it,” Boyden said in a news release.
The insurance board last summer added the benefits, which a consultant estimated could account for between $100,000 and $150,000, around .01 percent of annual state premiums. But board members voted 7-2 in December to drop the benefits days before they became effective after the state Department of Justice asked them to reconsider.
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Comments
Good sense in Madison? You’re kidding.
What happens if a transgender person changes their mind and wants to change back again – does health insurance have to cover that as well?
At what point do we admit that ‘gender reassignment’ is simply cosmetic surgery done for vanity reasons?
“Gender dysphoria” is a psychological (not medical) condition. It is rooted in the psyche, not the body, and hence cannot be remedied by lopping off body parts and surgically mutilating this or that. These people belong on the psychologist’s couch, not an operating table.
When my son was five years old he suffered terribly. He thought he was older, he thought he had all the answers, he thought that only if he were older then everything would be fine. Back then I should have paid for hormone therapy to induce puberty faster, had surgery perform to make him taller and such, colored his hair gray, and so forth to make him older. If I had done that then I am certain that he would have avoided all the stigma of having to grow up in highschool and grade school and would have turned out to be a far better balanced person. (sarc/)