Section 1557
By Some good news for your Friday the 13th – the Obama administration has again made it impossible to tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
The Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule Friday mandating that insurers provide health services for patients regardless of their gender identity as part of the Affordable Care Act, the second time in a single day that the administration has framed transgender rights as a central civil-rights issue.
That’s a small part of it. The final rule (which had been sitting at the OMB for about a month), includes sexual orientation and gender identity in the definition of sex and bars discrimination based on those characteristics by health care providers and health plans alike. To give an idea of how broad this rule is, it bars discrimination based on sexual stereotypes, which HHS defines as:
[Edit – swapped the CMS response to comments that outlines the definition for the final definition]
Sex stereotypes means stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity, including expectations of how individuals represent or communicate their gender to others, such as behavior, clothing, hairstyles, activities, voice, mannerisms, or body characteristics. These stereotypes can include the expectation that individuals will consistently identify with only one gender and that they will act in conformity with the gender-related expressions stereotypically associated with that gender. Sex stereotypes also include gendered expectations related to the appropriate roles of a certain sex.
OCR recognizes that an individual’s gender identity involves the interrelationship between an individual’s biology, gender, internal sense of self and gender expression related to that perception; thus, the gender identity spectrum includes an array of possible gender identities beyond male and female.
It may also be the first administrative reg to address intersectionality.
