On June 26, 2015, while many Cincinnatians celebrated the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage across the country, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County employee Rachel Dovel got some bad news. Dovel, 33, who has been transitioning from male to female for the past two years, says the library informed her it did not cover her gender confirmation surgery under its health insurance plan. Since then, Dovel and LQBTQ-rights lawyer Josh Langdon have been entangled in a battle with the library’s board of trustees to get the procedure covered.
On June 14, the library board voted to not include the procedure in its health plan. Dovel has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and has said she is considering legal action if the library doesn’t change its policy soon. CityBeat recently sat down with Dovel and Langdon to discuss the case and transgender issues in the community.
CityBeat: When did you discover the library’s insurance wouldn’t cover your procedure?
Rachel Dovel: I’ve been transitioning since 2014. I came out at the library in February 2015. I came out at work, and that went really well, so I felt really confident. I just kind of assumed that if you were insured, you were insured. In mid-June (of 2015), that’s when I called the insurance company, and they said this is excluded. I went up to human resources and said, “What’s going on with this? Can you look into this?” And they said yes. At that point I was feeling pretty good about how they were reacting to the issue. They seemed like they were practical and wanted to do something about it. But then two weeks later — on the day that the Supreme Court decision about equal marriage came out — they called me up to the office and told me that it was excluded. I basically went to Josh (Langdon) right after work, and I said, “What can we do about this?”
CB: You had a press conference about your fight with the library in April. Why did you decide to come out publicly about it?
RD: I’d rather not have to talk about it in public because it is a private issue, but, you know, we tried — we tried to talk about it in private with the people who make the decisions. We tried to explain how this affects me, affects other employees in the library, but (the library’s board of trustees) just doesn’t seem to be affected by that. If it means talking about something embarrassing in public, well, I guess I’ll just have to do that.
CB: You’ve worked at the library for 10 years. How has this changed your relationship with the library?
RD: It’s been stressful, very stressful. I mean, I go in there every day, and I work as hard as I can, but sometimes I wonder why I’m doing that for my health needs. This is a benefit I’ve agreed to. There’s a contract somewhere that says I will do this work and you will pay me this amount and give me these benefits, and that’s what capitalism is. It’s a business contract. There’s a staff forum that is supposedly anonymous (for library employees to express various concerns). It’s been an interesting little debate back and forth between people who support me on this and the people who don’t. A bunch of people have said, “I want us to cover it.” Some people have said, “I don’t want us covering unnecessary cosmetic surgery.”
CB: What is the general process you have to go through in order to get gender confirmation surgery approved by an insurance company?
RD: If you’re going to get the surgery, there are all these prerequisites to make sure that you’re not, I don’t know, doing this for no good reason. You have to have been on hormones for at least a year. You have to have been living full time in your desired gender identity for a year. There’s a thing called the “lived experience,” which means being socially out as your gender identity. Then, two letters from mental health professionals. One has to be a psychiatrist.
CB: Transgender issues have been in the news recently with the passage of HB2 in North Carolina requiring people to use the bathroom of the gender listed on their birth certificate. What has been your reaction to that?
RD: Those (laws) are infuriating. The North Carolina law is maddening. The governor of the state is sitting there talking about, “We just have to protect our daughters and our wives from people creeping on them in the bathroom.” Basically, this just files us right in the category of we’re all rapists and pedophiles, which is not true at all. It’s illegal to assault or spy on people wherever, not just bathrooms. So I would think that law would already be enough to cover this kind of stuff, but, also, even if these people were doing that, why do trans people have to pay? That’s not our problem.
CB: Are you surprised the board voted not to extend a number of benefits to its employees, including the coverage you requested? What are your next steps?
RD: I was a little surprised, honestly. I had been feeling a bit hopeful. Given the educational effort we made and the obvious direction our country is heading as far as LGBT rights, I had hoped the board at least saw the writing on the wall, if not actually felt sympathy for the struggle of its LGBT employees — or maybe that the publicity of their discriminatory behavior would shame them into doing the right thing. I’m also surprised they aren’t more concerned about their legal obligation; both the Affordable Care Act and Title VII make clear that discrimination based on gender identity is not OK. ©
This article appears in Jun 22-29, 2016.
