Breaking News: Feds Release Amazing Trans Personnel Policies

What a wonderful start for our weekend, the Office of Personnel Management at the US Govt. just released a trio of personnel policies to support transgender employees. See the links below for their new policies on

1. Guidance for working with trans employees.
2. Guidance for fed insurers to categorize trans people by their true sex, while still providing body care for their birth sex.
3. Guidance for how to seal a personnel file and build new one after transition.

Dangdingle! Now this is cultural competency at its best, the stuff that really helps sweep away LGBT health disparities. (remember how the NCTE & Task Force trans survey showed trans smoking rate was 50% higher than general pop, or how the trans suicide attempt rate was 26x higher than general pop, etc. etc.)

I only wish my own health insurance was as good on #2! (OK yes, we could have more here but I gotta give props that this is more than most insurance companies offer now.) Last time my docs tried to list male in my records, my insurance company responded by turning down every bill for months. Oy.

So, let the mad rush to become a federal employee start now!

See the online resources here:

·         http://www.opm.gov/diversity/Transgender/Guidance.asp

·         http://www.opm.gov/diversity/transgender/

·         http://www.opm.gov/feddata/Ch4_ReconstructPersonnelFolder.pdf, and·         http://www.opm.gov/carrier/carrier_letters/2011/2011-12.pdf

Great job to OPM’s Director, John Berry, his Counselor, Vic Basile, and all the other LGBT advocates over there who I know worked on this for quite a long time.