Transgender man charges Dignity Health discriminated against him

A transgender man filed suit Wednesday against Dignity Health, the state’s largest private hospital chain, for canceling his hysterectomy operation after learning of his gender identity.

When his lawyer told him of the hospital’s decision a day before the scheduled surgery in August, “I just fell to the floor, just crying and crying,” Evan Minton of Orangevale (Sacramento County) said in an interview. “It hurt because I was being discriminated against because of who I am.”

That hospital, like most Dignity Health facilities, is affiliated with the Catholic Church. Dignity referred Minton to a nearby hospital in its chain that was not church-affiliated, and his doctor was able to gain emergency admission and perform the surgery three days later. That enabled Minton to undergo a penile implant, the last stage in his sex-reassignment surgery.

His lawsuit against Dignity Health and its Sacramento-area hospital, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, seeks a court order barring them from discriminating against transgender patients and $4,000 in damages for violation of California’s sex-bias law. That law prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, said Elizabeth Gill of the American Civil Liberties Union, a lawyer for Minton.

Dignity Health, based in San Francisco, was founded as Catholic Healthcare West and owns 39 hospitals, 24 of them affiliated with the Catholic Church. In a statement Wednesday, the company said the hospital that refused to perform the hysterectomy provides its services “to all members of the communities we serve without discrimination,” but that the chain’s Catholic hospitals “do not provide elective sterilizations,” following their “Ethical and Religious Directives.”

In a separate case in federal court in Oakland, Dignity Health has argued that its refusal to perform or provide coverage for transgender surgery is gender-neutral because it applies equally to men and women.

Minton, 35, is a former state legislative staffer and is co-chair of the state Democratic Party’s LGBT Caucus. Born with a woman’s body, he said he started identifying as male in 2011 and began hormone therapy a year later.

He underwent a mastectomy in 2014, got his name changed in court records and on his driver’s license, and scheduled the hysterectomy for Aug. 30 at Dignity’s Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, where his doctor had admitting privileges.

Minton said he spoke by phone with a hospital nurse on Aug. 28 and mentioned at the end of the call that he was transgender and wanted to be addressed with male pronouns. The nurse raised no objections, Minton said, but the surgery department called his doctor the next day and told her the operation would violate hospital policy.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko