Georgia legislators have an unhealthy obsession with trans people’s health
It’s that time of year in Georgia again! Red wing blackbirds are everywhere, the Peach State’s celebrity groundhog Gen. Beauregard Lee saw his shadow predicting another six weeks of winter, March Madness is fast approaching and our State Legislature is crafting more legislation to discriminate against transgender Georgians.
Last year, Senate Bill 39, a bill to deny health coverage for Georgia’s state employees and their families, didn’t make it into law. But this is an election year, so the legislature has cued up its performative moral outrage to try again.
House Bill 54, a nursing bill written to add options for home health care, has been amended to mandate that the State Employee Health Benefit Plan, a plan that covers a half million Georgians, restrict coverage of care for transgender Georgians, despite that eliminating coverage will cost the state more than including it.
Allowing transgender state employees to access medical care and mental health counseling, just as we do for every other state employee, is a basic aspect of medical insurance, insurance for which the employees themselves pay a substantial portion of the cost.
I’m one of those state employees. I’ve taught in the University System of Georgia (USG) for more than two decades. I’ve taught thousands of students. I’m a Governor’s Teaching Fellow and am even in the USG’s Felton Jenkins, Jr. Teaching Hall of Fame. Trans people are not a burden to Georgia; we’re a part of your community. But we’re a small and politically powerless group, so if you need a convenient villain then it’s easy to paint us as villains.
Ga. once had similar discriminatory laws
The authors of HB 54 argue that they don’t want state dollars to pay for gender-affirming care, but a man who gets a prescription for testosterone or Viagra receives gender-affirming care.
This bill is about who is allowed that care and what that care must be. I was assigned male at birth, which, according to our legislature, means that if I go to an endocrinologist I’ll be insured if my doctor decides that I need testosterone, but that same visit won’t be covered if my doctor decides that I need estrogen instead.
They want to tell doctors what to prescribe to their adult patients and to create barriers to medical care for a very specific group of state employees and their families.
To be even clearer, if anyone else who works for the state needs to see a mental health professional, that’s covered by our insurance. If a trans person needs to see a therapist, it won’t be covered.
Our legislators, who clearly believe that trans people suffer from mental illness, want to deny us mental health care. Or maybe they just want a way to keep trans people, or anyone with a trans person in their family, from working for the state or from wanting to move here in the first place.
If you’re wondering why this isn’t already law in Georgia, it used to be. But because it’s discriminatory the state kept getting sued over it. Over the years there have been numerous lawsuits, and the state never won a single case. We, the taxpayers, have shelled out millions in losses, legal costs and settlements over their ridiculous legislative obsession.
This short-sighted push is ‘costly and inhumane’
Our legislators know that HB 54 is discriminatory. My guess, as a professor of marketing, is that this is meant to be a signal. They know that lawsuits will cost Georgia an order of magnitude more than any tiny amount they might reduce policy rates. That’s likely why the proposal doesn’t include a cost/benefit analysis. But they want to cater to the societal mistrust built by the U.S. president’s oddly ever-present messaging of “No Transgender for Everyone,” which he manages to include even in completely unrelated speeches or Truth Social posts.
The legislators supporting this are counting on the anti-trans votes they’ll get in primaries and in November by riding on that bandwagon, regardless of the costs to our state and to our state’s employees and their families.
I’ve done nothing to hurt those legislators, our education system, our state or you. The people this bill impacts are just doing their jobs, serving Georgia as best we can. To deny us medical and mental health care isn’t just short-sighted; it’s both costly and inhumane. This very obviously isn’t about saving money. From here, it feels like the cruelty is the point.
As a lifelong Georgian, I still remember the old Atlanta slogan: “The city too busy to hate.” I can’t help but wonder if our legislators have had too much free time while they’ve been in town for that saying to still apply.
Dr. Joanna Schwartz is a professor of marketing at Georgia College and State University. The opinion here is hers alone and doesn’t reflect the position of Georgia College and State University or the University System of Georgia.
