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Corporate dominoes

The remarkable progress in corporate America's embrace and support of its transgender workers shows the U.S. competitive spirit is alive and well--and helping boost the T part of the LGBT rainbow
An Advocate.com exclusive posted September 19, 2006
Corporate dominoes

I’m interrupting my Transgender 101 Series to pass along some big news for transgender people from this week’s release of the 2006 Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index (CEI) and the Out and Equal 2006 Workplace Summit in mid September.

HRC gave those of us attending the Out and Equal Summit a sneak peak at the 2006 CEI results released on September 19. The annual CEI is a tool to measure how equitably companies are treating their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees, consumers, and investors. Scoring 100% each year is rapidly becoming essential for major employers.

This year, HRC raised the bar to include transgender parity in at least one of five wellness benefits, and the results are exciting. Of the 446 companies in the survey, a total of 303 companies offer at least one of the specified benefits for their transgender employees, and a staggering 67 offer all five. More impressively, 28% of the employers provide health benefits for trans-related surgical procedures.

HRC told us that some companies are surprised to find that their health insurance coverage excludes gender identity-related treatments. The language is often in the master policy because it is the “standard” offering from the insurance company. Once employers learn this, it is often only a matter of demanding that their insurers remove the exclusion.

The exclusion is standard because of fears over the cost of inclusion. But Mary Ann Horton, in her eye-opening Out and Equal session on "The Cost of Transgender Health Benefits," showed convincingly that the cost is considerably less than that of domestic partner coverage, even when taking into account a generous margin of error.

Horton backed up her calculations with the experience of the City and Country of San Francisco, which has provided comprehensive transgender health coverage since 2001. Their actuaries knew there were 27 transgender municipal employees, and therefore geared up to pay for 35 surgeries each year. But they missed the fact that some transgender people never have surgery and those that do generally only have it once in a lifetime. Actual cost experience has been no worse than that for gall bladder removal or heart surgery.

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Herman is the first transgender member of the boards of The Point Foundation, the national LGBT scholarship fund, and of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the New England-based LGBT legal rights organization that filed and argued the court case that brought same-sex marriage to Massachusetts. She is also a member of the advisory board of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

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