Mom Launches Court Battle for Teen’s Gender Reassignment Surgery
Many parents of transgender kids face tough internal battles — but one mom is waging a public one on her child’s behalf, suing her employer and insurance provider for denying medical coverage for her 17-year-old’s transition from female to male.
“I was really disappointed with my employer,” Brittany Tovar (pictured above) of St. Paul, Minn., told the Star Tribune on Wednesday. “It’s hard coming to work, and my employer considers my son a second-class citizen.”
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Tovar, also a parent, along with her husband, to two other teen sons, is a nurse practitioner with Essentia Health. She’s suing both that company and insurance company HealthPartners for failing to cover medication and surgery for Reid Tovar Olson (née Madison Olson), who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2014. To receive such a diagnosis, according to the DSM-IV (the American Psychiatric Association’s guide to standard of care), “there must be a marked difference between the individual’s expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her, and it must continue for at least six months.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court, claims that Tovar’s insurance plan “contains a categorical exclusion … for services and/or surgery for gender reassignment, regardless of medical necessity.”
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The complaint echoes that of a lawsuit filed in December against Minnesota by the American Civil Liberties Union because the state’s public health insurance programs don’t cover gender reassignment surgery. While the insurance “provides coverage for medically necessary care for virtually every type of medical condition,” it features a “sweeping and categorical exclusion” for all surgeries relating to gender dysphoria, the ACLU noted in a press release.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found Wednesday that Tovar had “reasonable cause” to pursue the legal action, according to the Star Tribune. Neither Essentia nor HealthPartners have commented on the lawsuit.
As part of Olson’s physical gender transition, he was prescribed a form of testosterone called Androderm, as well as puberty-blocker Lupron, which prevents menstruation, and costs about $9,000, according to the suit. “This was unaffordable for her, and as a result, her son was not able to obtain the medical benefit of Lupron,” the lawsuit reads. It continues, “Tovar and her family suffered additional harms as well. Tovar’s son was angry, hurt, and concerned about burdening his family financially. He also worried about the impact of the coverage dispute on his mother’s employment. Tovar suffered worry, anger, disappointment, and sleepless nights. It was more difficult for her to focus on her work, and she suffered a sharp increase in migraines. Her concerns for her son led her to cry at work in between patients. She reduced her hours at work because of the stress.”
This spring Olson has a mastectomy scheduled, which could cost up to $10,000. “I get the bill,” Tovar said. “But if your kid had cancer, you’d do anything. This is my duty, my job.”
While Tovar is remarkable in her proudly public support of her transgender child, she is not alone. In May of 2015, Robynn Bell, mom to a 13-year-old transgender daughter, launched a Change.org petition calling for Medicaid to cover specific treatments for transgender children — “puberty blockers,” like Lupron, which are injectable drugs that work by blocking the brain’s release of the hormone-stimulating proteins that produce secondary sex characteristics (with results that are reversible).
Then there was Lindsay Peace, a Canadian mom who had her tattoo-artist husband Steve tweak the tattoo of her child after the now teen transitioned from female to male, as well as Jodi Patterson and Joseph Ghartey, the parents of a 7-year-old transgender son who agreed to have their family of six profiled in a recent issue of Family Circle magazine. And earlier in 2015, Brooklyn parents Francisca Montana and Avery Daily proudly described life with transgender son Q in a well-publicized three-part series on NPR.
Regarding the legal battle she’s waging on behalf of Olson, Tovar said, “It’s not even about the money. I’m trying to change [the coverage] and make access to health care for transgender [people] as it should be. To have a blanket exclusion for transgender is against the law. It’s discriminatory.”
Top photo: Facebook
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