Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she's not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.
As many have already uncovered Sandra Fluke she is, in reality, a 30 year old long time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students' birth control. She has been pushing for mandated coverage of contraceptives at Georgetown for at least three years according to the Washington Post.
However, as I discovered today, birth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if "gender reassignment" surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
The title of the article, which can be purchased in full here, is Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons and was published in the Journal's 2011 Annual Review. I have posted a transcript of the section I will be quoting from here. In a subsection of the article entitled "Employment Discrimination in Provision of Employment Benefits" starting on page 635 of the review Sandra Fluke and her co-editor describe two forms of discrimination in benefits they believe LGBTQ individuals face in the work place:
"Discrimination typically takes two forms: first, direct discrimination limiting access to benefits specifically needed by LGBTQ persons, and secondly, the unavailability of family-related benefits to LGBTQ families."
Their "prime example" of the first form of discrimination? Not covering sex change operations:
"A prime example of direct discrimination is denying insurance coverage for medical needs of transgender persons physically transitioning to the other gender."
This so called "prime example" of discrimination is expounded on in a subsection titled "Gender Reassignment Medical Services" starting on page 636:
"Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered."
To be clear, the argument here is that employers are engaging in discrimination against their employees who want them to pay for their sex changes because their "heterosexist" health insurance policies don't believe sex changes are medically necessary.
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