A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court's ruling that a Georgia county illegally discriminated against a sheriff's deputy by failing to pay for her gender-affirming surgery. Houston County Sgt. Anna Lange had sued Sheriff Cullen Talton and the county in 2019 after she was denied coverage.
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled in favor of transgender patients on Monday. The case was brought by Medicaid recipients in West Virginia and state employees in North Carolina.
The state of Georgia will start paying for gender-affirming health care for public employees covered by a state health insurance plan. Two state employees and a public school media clerk sued last year over the state's refusal to pay.
A federal judge in Atlanta has blocked Georgia from enforcing a new law that restricts doctors from prescribing hormone therapy to transgender people under the age of 18. Judge Sarah Geraghty granted a preliminary injunction on Sunday.
The state will ban most gender-affirming surgeries and hormone replacement therapies for transgender people under 18 with a new bill signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp.
Wednesday at Political Rewind:The Legislature passed Senate Bill 140, which would block gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Will Gov. Brian Kemp sign the bill? Meanwhile: Lt. Gov. Burt Jones is pushing a bill on hospitals in rural Georgia that could benefit his family's business.
Officials in Houston County said gender-affirming surgery for sheriff’s deputy Anna Lange was too costly. They spent more than $1 million on private lawyers in a fight to keep transition-related care from being covered by their health plan — far more than it would have cost the county to offer such coverage to all of its 1,500 health plan members.
Thursday on Political Rewind: A Texas federal judge says he’ll rule soon on the use of a pill that induces more than half of the abortions in the U.S. Plus, new details on the 2020 phone conversation between former President Donald Trump and late Georgia House Speaker David Ralston.
Monday on Political Rewind:With the 2024 elections around the corner, Republicans nationwide are promoting anti-transgender legislation. We look at the measures under the Dome. Plus, the mother of Manuel Teran says an independent autopsy shows the activist's hands were raised when they were killed.
The case suing the state for denying coverage of transgender-related health care in the Georgia State Health Benefit Plan was filed Wednesday in federal court in Atlanta on behalf of a staff accountant at the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, a school media clerk in Bibb County, and an anonymous employee of the Division of Family and Children Services on behalf of her young adult child who is enrolled in the state plan.
Activists are campaigning against clinics that offer care for transgender teenagers. Some families worry that will only fuel efforts to ban gender-affirming care in their state.