The ACLU of Northern California Tuesday, Oct 22 sent a letter to the Yuba Community College District and Tri-County Schools Insurance Group notifying them that both organisations needed to remove a provision in the district’s employee health care plans that discriminates against transgender people with a blanket-exclusion for gender-affirming care.

The ACLU sent the letter on behalf of their client, Brian Condrey, an English Professor at Yuba College, was refused health care coverage for his daughter Stella, who is transgender. As a result, Condrey spent thousands of dollars so Stella could obtain medically necessary care that had been unlawfully denied to her. According to the letter;

‘’[…] all the Condrey family’s claims of coverage for Stella’s gender-affirming care were denied on the basis of an explicit exclusion in your health plan. This exclusion, which appears on p. Page 2 46 of the Tri-County Schools Insurance Group (TCSIG) Employee Health Plan (“Health Plan,” attached as Exhibit A), provides that the following care is not a covered benefit: “[c]harges for services, supplies or treatment for transsexualism, gender dysphoria or sexual reassignment or change, including medications, implants, hormone therapy, surgery, medical or psychiatric treatment.””

The ACLU further noted that The only written explanation Condrey received regarding the exclusion was a letter from Delta Health Systems, the Third-Party Administrator for the Health Plan, in November 2017 which alleged that Yuba’s provider, TSCIG “is not subject to the [Affordable Care Act] non-discrimination rule. Therefore, the charges were denied correctly and no allowance can be provided.”

“This was blatantly illegal under California law which explicitly says you can’t discriminate based on gender identity,” Elizabeth Gill, a Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU of Northern California and the National ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project said in an emailed statement. “It’s really distressing that in the year 2019, a public college in California would be engaged in this type of explicit discrimination against transgender people.”

In the hope of avoiding unnecessary litigation, the ACLU said, it is urging the district and its insurer to remove the unlawful exclusion for gender affirming care and compensate employees who have been harmed by it.

“California law in fact explicitly recognizes that healthcare coverage exclusions related to gender-affirming care are discrimination based on gender identity,” Gill wrote in the letter.

“It is again astonishing to us that in 2019 a California community college would have an exclusion for gender-affirming care in its employee health plan—and apparently defend the exclusion as both legal and appropriate,” she added.

The ACLU set a deadline for a response by October 29, after which the organisation told the Los Angeles Blade it will file the requisite legal paperwork for a lawsuit.

A spokesperson for Tri-County Schools Insurance Group refused comment when contacted by the Los Angeles Blade.