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Half-Naked Woman with a Hat, 1911, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

from the series East L.A. Portraits, 1978-80

“The Trump administration formally proposed on Friday to roll back Obama-era civil rights safeguards that had banned discrimination against transgender medical patients and health insurance customers.

The Department of Health and Human Services’s proposed regulation would replace a 2016 rule from the Obama administration that defined discrimination “on the basis of sex” to include gender identity. The Trump administration rule would no longer recognize gender identity as an avenue for sex discrimination.

Without the Obama-era language, insurers would not be bound to cover all services for transgender customers.

The new rule would fit into a broader agenda pushed by religious activists and is consistent with administration actions to limit civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans in a variety of domains, including education, employment and housing.

The Obama administration adopted the health care discrimination rule to carry out a civil rights provision of the Affordable Care Act. It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.

The Obama administration included “gender identity” as an aspect of sex, and specified that the term means a person’s “internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female, and which may be different from an individual’s sex assigned at birth.” The Obama-era definition of discrimination also protected women who had terminated a pregnancy.

“The Trump-Pence administration’s latest attack threatens to undermine crucial nondiscrimination protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people provided for under the Affordable Care Act,” David Stacy, the government affairs director for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “The administration puts L.G.B.T.Q. people at greater risk of being denied necessary and appropriate health care solely based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Advocates for transgender people warned that the rule would allow and even encourage providers who are biased against transgender people to deny them treatment. Taken with the recent rule protecting religious health care workers, they said, the administration’s policies shift the civil rights landscape away from patients who may be subject to discrimination and toward clinicians who have objections to treating them, or insurers who do not want to pay for their care.

“What this does from a very practical point of view is that it empowers bad actors to be bad actors,” said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. She added that already, transgender people “are turned away from E.R.s, dismissed by insurers and mocked by untrained hospital staff, all while trying to seek the care every American deserves.”

Beyond affecting transgender people, the new rule could also open the door to discrimination in health care on the basis of sex stereotypes, said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a senior lawyer and health care strategist at Lambda Legal, a gay rights group. “That may mean whether somebody conforms to expectations about their sex as perceived by others with regard to behavior, clothing, with whom they associate romantically or how they present their identity,” he added. “That applies writ large to people who are L.G.B.T.Q., but also to straight people who are gender nonconforming in their presentation.”

And a proposal this week from the Department of Housing and Urban Development would allow homeless shelters to require transgender clients to use bathrooms or sleeping accommodations that match their biological sex.” /End NY Times article excerpt.

Please keep following this proposed revision in the news so you can be ready to submit your fullhearted opposition when the commenting is opened! When the time comes to comment, here’s how you can do it:

1) Federal eRulemaking Portal. You may submit electronic comments at http://www.regulations.gov by searching for the Docket ID number [INSERT DOCKET NUMBER]. Follow the instructions at http://www.regulations.gov online for submitting comments through this method. Electronic comments with attachments should be in Microsoft Word or Excel; however, we prefer Microsoft Word. 

2) Regular, Express, or Overnight Mail: You may mail comments to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights, Attention: Section 1557 NPRM, RIN 0945-AA11, Hubert H. Humphrey Building, Room 509F, 200 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20201. Please allow sufficient time for mailed comments to be timely received in the event of delivery or security delays. 

3) Hand Delivery / Courier: You may hand deliver comments to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights, Attention: Section 1557 NPRM, RIN 0945-AA11, Hubert H. Humphrey Building, Room 509F, 200 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20201. Because access to the interior of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building is not readily available to persons without Federal government identification, commenters are encouraged to leave their comments in the mail drop slots located in the lobby of the building.

All comments received by the methods and due date specified above will be posted without change to http://www.regulations.gov, including any personal information provided, and such posting may occur before or after the closing of the comment period.

Please note that comments submitted by fax or email and those submitted after the comment period will not be accepted.

DISCRIMINATION SHOULD STAY ILLEGAL!

“Wicked Games” photographed by Betina du Toit for Marie Claire US November 2018