The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado alleges in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that Children’s Hospital Colorado is discriminating against transgender patients by refusing to perform surgeries it offers to cisgender patients with other conditions.
The lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court, also states the hospital is discriminating on the basis of disability because gender dysphoria — distress when a person’s sense of their gender doesn’t align with physical characteristics — is a medical condition.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of an 18-year-old Denver patient who was on track to receive chest reconstruction surgery before the Aurora hospital discontinued gender-affirming surgeries for adults last year.
Representatives of Children’s Hospital Colorado said they couldn’t comment Wednesday because the hospital hadn’t yet been served with the lawsuit.
The main reason young cisgender men seek chest reconstruction surgery is if they developed feminine-appearing breasts because of hormonal imbalances or medication side effects, according to the lawsuit. The hospital also sometimes performs breast reduction surgery on young women who have excessive chest tissue that causes pain, the lawsuit said.
The patient, who is identified in the lawsuit by the pseudonym Caden Kent, started receiving care at Children’s for mental health concerns when he was 16. He was diagnosed with gender dysphoria a few months later and had undergone about eight months of assessment before determining he was a candidate for surgery once he turned 18.
In July, the hospital announced it would no longer offer chest reconstruction surgery for transgender patients, though they could still receive other gender-affirming treatment, including counseling, puberty blockers and hormone therapy. The hospital had only offered surgery to patients who were at least 18.
At the time, the hospital stated it had received an unusual number of referrals for gender-affirming surgery as programs shut down in other states, and that it didn’t shut down the program because of threats. It came at a time when children’s hospitals were scrubbing references to transgender care from their websites, though, with at least 21 removing information in 2022.
According to the lawsuit, Kent chose to undergo surgery at Children’s because he received other care there, and hoped to recover from the surgery before leaving for college in the fall. Other surgical providers who accept his family’s insurance were booked up, meaning his parents will have to pay out-of-pocket for him to undergo the surgery in that time frame.
Kent had resorted to chest-binding to ease his dysphoria, but found himself withdrawing from others when binding became too painful and he couldn’t otherwise hide the breast tissue, the lawsuit said.
Children’s Hospital Colorado’s “abrupt cancellation of all gender-affirming surgeries for its trans patients was devastating to Caden, other impacted patients, and Colorado’s transgender community,” ACLU of Colorado legal director Tim Macdonald said in a news release. “Refusal to provide medically necessary care based on the identity of the person seeking it, and the condition for which they are seeking it, is discriminatory and illegal under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act.”
One Colorado, a group that advocates for LGBTQ people, said it has been working with the hospital to address concerns and reinstate the option for surgical care there, but supports Kent and the lawsuit.
“While we are grateful for the steps Children’s Hospital has taken to repair with our community, we must acknowledge the rippling systemic impacts of their decision — setting the precedent for a hospital to provide services to one group of individuals but not another,” health equity director Alex Floyd said in a news release. “For this reason, we stand behind the ACLU’s decision and all trans and gender-expansive Coloradans and their right to equitable access to medically necessary care.”
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