ATLANTA – A group of Georgians is suing the state over its failure to provide health benefits for transgender people through the State Health Benefit Plan, which provides health coverage for state employees, including public school employees.
Two of the plaintiffs in the case work for the state, while one is the son of a state employee covered by the State Health Benefit Plan. The lawsuit maintains the failure to provide the medical services, including gender-confirming surgery, amounts to discrimination based on sex. The Campaign for Southern Equality, an LGBTQ advocacy group with members in Georgia, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
“I grew up in Georgia, I went to college in Georgia, and now I work for the state of Georgia. I want to see Georgia lead on treating people fairly,” said Micha Rich, one of the plaintiffs. He is a staff accountant for the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts.
“I love what I do and that I get to work in service of the public good. But my employer should not be able to deny me health care because of who I am. For years, I had to put off living my life fully while I waited to have the medical treatments my doctors and I knew I needed,” Rich added.
Medicare and many other private insurance companies already cover the treatments. Recent lawsuits have successfully pushed other health plans in Georgia to provide gender-confirming treatment, including surgery. A lawsuit forced the University System of Georgia to cover the medical care in 2018.
Earlier this year, a federal district judge ruled employers cannot deny or exclude coverage for gender-confirming care for transgender people after a Houston County policy denied coverage for a county employee who wanted the surgery. In July, the state Medicaid program changed its policy to cover transgender health-care, including gender-confirmation surgery, as part of a settlement in a separate lawsuit.
The majority of state health benefit plans cover the services, said Adam Polaski, a spokesperson for the Campaign for Southern Equality, an LGBTQ advocacy group that is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. A federal judge earlier this year ruled North Carolina’s state benefit plan must change its policy to cover gender-confirming care after a similar lawsuit in that state.
Gender dysphoria is a recognized medical condition that results in mental distress because of a mismatch between the sex a person was born with and their gender identity, the person’s own sense of their gender. The condition was first included in a standard psychiatric reference, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM), in 2013.
The American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, along with many other national medical groups, recommend gender-confirmation therapy, hormonal treatments, and surgery as possible treatments for gender dysphoria.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.