Yesterday And Today

Yesterday I drove down to New Haven and on the way I got stuck in a forty-five minutes backup from an accident. I had a truck on each side of my little Prius, the axles were just about at eye level and their engines were rumbling just a few feet from my ears.

But when I got to New Haven I meet up with some friends from UConn School of Social Work and one of their interns. We were classmates and we also worked together to pass the gender identity and expression anti-discrimination bill here in Connecticut. It was nice to catch up on what everyone is doing now. Then we got down to business to discuss the Affordable Care Act and how it effects the trans-community with their intern who is doing a project on the act.

What many people don’t know is that Health and Human Services (HHS) has said that trans-people cannot be discriminated against and that the Civil Rights Act Title VII applies to the healthcare coverage for us. An article in The Nation said,

The Affordable Care Act will end many of these absurd exclusions. In 2014, the Patient’s Bill of Rights will prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. What’s more, the ACA will bring Title VII federal nondiscrimination protections to the healthcare field. The Department of Health and Human Services, responding to both pressure from LGBTQ advocacy groups and precedents set by recent federal court cases, recently confirmed that this policy will ban discrimination based on gender identity. This will not only help transgender and gender non-conforming people obtain coverage but will also outlaw the discrimination Kallio [a trans-man who was discriminated in healthcare coverage because he is trans.] and so many others have suffered when pursuing treatment. Considering that one in five transgender people have been refused medical care based on their gender identity, these discrimination protections are critical.

For many of us our insurance policies do not cover surgery or in some cases hormones because they are considered preexisting conditions and under the ACA we will now be covered. In addition, the act requires cultural competency training for medical personnel.

What we want to do is to get that information out to the community because many trans-people do not know that they be able to get their hormones and surgery. So the meeting today was how to dissimulate that information.

Today I am up at the University of Connecticut in Storrs teaching a class on multicultural education, the students are all graduate students in education. I am a guest lecturer for a friend’s class and this will be the second year that I am teaching the class on trans-culture. I polished the class presentation over a little from last year, I took out some of the material that fell flat and added some new material. Last year when I taught the lesson I finished about 20 minutes early and the students loved getting out early so this year I added a section about a model school gender non-conforming policy. Hopefully, I will end on time and allow enough time for questions.

Update 11/6/13 11:30AM
I still finished the class early and I asked them before they ran off what they though was missing or what shouldn't have been covered or what they thought should have more coverage. They seem to want more videos in the presentation.