WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is facing a new legal complaint from a group of government employees affected by a new policy that took effect Thursday that eliminates coverage of gender-affirming care in federal health insurance plans.
The complaint, filed Thursday by the Human Rights Campaign on behalf of employees, comes in response to the Office of Personnel Management’s announcement in August that health insurance plans for federal employees and U.S. Postal Service workers would no longer cover “chemical and surgical changes in an individual’s gender characteristics through medical intervention.”
The complaint alleges that the denial of gender-affirming care is discrimination on the basis of sex and asks the personnel office to rescind the policy.
“This policy has nothing to do with cost or care and everything to do with driving transgender people and people with transgender spouses, children and dependents out of the federal workforce,” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, said in a statement announcing the move.
The complaint, filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, includes testimony from four current federal workers at the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Postal Service who would be directly affected by the elimination of insurance coverage.
For example, the Postal Service employee had a daughter who was recommended by doctors to take puberty blockers and possibly hormone replacement therapy for her diagnosed gender dysphoria, which the new OPM policy did not cover.
The workers filed the claim on behalf of themselves and “a class of similarly situated federal employees,” the complaint states.
The Trump administration has taken other steps to limit care for transgender Americans, particularly minors. In December, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released proposals to ban gender-affirming care for minors, including a policy that would prohibit Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals that provide such care to children.
Senior Trump officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have called gender-affirming care for minors “inappropriate behavior.” But such restrictions go against the advice of major medical groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
