Transgender and gender diverse individuals regularly face discrimination in health care settings and often lack access to affordable, high-quality health care coverage that includes gender-affirming services. The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation (CHLPI) works at both the federal and state levels to fight against health care discrimination and increase access to care.
Our Approach
CHLPI recognizes that access to affordable, high-quality health care is impossible unless protections against health care discrimination are robust and enforced. During the Trump Administration, the federal government did not just fail to support transgender and gender diverse communities, it engaged in a relentless attack on these protections. Among its most significant steps was the promulgation of new regulations designed to undermine protections against discrimination in health care on the basis of sex and other protected characteristics. These changes were intended to erase gender identity and sex stereotyping as grounds to claim health care discrimination and to reduce the number of entities that would be accountable to non-discrimination standards. In response, CHLPI represents federally qualified health centers in Boston and New Orleans, among others, as co-counsel in a federal lawsuit challenging the validity of the 2020 rollback of non-discrimination regulations.
At the state level, CHLPI works with local legal and policy advocates to combat discrimination in health care and to increase access to gender-affirming services. CHLPI, along with Lambda Legal, Most & Associates, and Davis Polk, represent five transgender Louisiana youth and their families and have sued a state agency to stop the harm caused by a state law prohibiting the provision of necessary gender-affirming medical care. CHLPI is also a member of the Massachusetts Trans Health Coalition, working in concert with advocates from across the commonwealth to strengthen state protections against discrimination and to ensure that health care plans, including MassHealth (Massachusetts’ Medicaid program), provide accessible and affordable coverage of gender affirming care.