Yale considers offering sex change surgeries

Following in the footsteps of other Ivy League schools, including Harvard and Brown, Yale University is considering adding gender reassignment surgery to the Yale student health care plan.

Yale University is considering offering transgender reassignment surgery to their student health care plan.

Such surgeries have been covered for faculty and staff at the professional and managerial levels since 2011 and for all unionized workers since last month.

Director of University Health Services, Dr. Paul Genecin, told the Yale Daily News on Monday such changes to the student benefits are now “under consideration.”

Genecin told the paper he has seen an “increasing interest” in covering the surgery among Ivy League schools in general and has had a “small number” of students express interest in the coverage at Yale specifically.

One student, Michelle Morgan, GRD ‘15 made such a request — not for herself, but for her female-to-male transgender partner.

She told the News she thought it was unfair that not only that Yale Health did not offer the surgery to students, but also that the policy extends only to married couples.

“Yale’s slowness on this issue is a problem from the perspective of history,” Morgan told the paper. “When history looks back on gender-confirming surgeries and coverage, Yale should strive to be on the cutting edge and not defensive side of that history.”

LGBTQ Resource Center Director Maria Trumpler GRD ’92 told Campus Reform in an interview on Tuesday she has been working on getting the coverage for students for six years — and that both school policy and students lives depend on it.

“It is a medical necessity, that has been Yale’s position, so the medical necessity … and creating a campus in which trans people are fully included and live up to our nondiscrimination policy,” she said.

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