05-31-2017
A federal district court judge has allowed a discrimination case based on gender dysphoria to proceed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to the American Psychiatric Association, Gender Dysphoria is “a conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify.”
Kate Blatt claimed that shortly after her hire by Cabela’s, she was discriminated against based on her gender and disability. She was diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria, which was alleged to have interfered with her major life activities of “interacting with others, reproduction, and social and occupational functioning.” Thus, she argued that it qualified as a disability under the ADA. However, the ADA explicitly excludes certain disorders from its protection, among those so excluded are gender identity disorders.
The federal district court judge concluded that gender dysphoria was more than just not identifying with a specific gender but rather a debilitating condition that was covered by the ADA. This judge contended that some gender identity disorders may narrowly refer to simply identifying with another gender and thus the ADA would not apply to those individuals. However, the ADA was not intended to remove from coverage those individuals with disabling conditions such as gender dysphoria. This classification allowed the court to sidestep the issue of whether the ADA’s prohibition of coverage for gender identity conditions was constitutional.