Entering the 2016-17 academic year, Vanderbilt University will now offer sex reassignment surgery for its transgender students through the school’s health care plan.

Vanderbilt University’s student health care plan has included hormone therapy for a number of years, but this will be the first year it has included sex reassignment surgery.

Sex reassignment surgery alters an individual’s sexual characteristics to correspond with the person’s gender identity.

The school had been discussing the inclusion of the surgery plan for several years before implementation, said RJ Robles, a graduate student at Vanderbilt.

Robles, a gender nonconforming student at Vanderbilt who uses they, them and their pronouns, said the change will impact a number of students at the university.

“When I say ‘transgender,’ I use it as an umbrella term to include folks who identify beyond the gender binary such as genderqueer, gender nonconforming, etc.,” they said. “So there are many students at the Vanderbilt campus who this would impact.”

Robles is a leader in Vanderbilt’s Trans Buddy program, which helps transgender people in the Vanderbilt community with patient advocacy and also trains medical providers on transgender health care.

“It takes doing that work in order for a system that was not created with trans people in mind to really start opening itself up to including trans people and serving trans people,” they said.

Vanderbilt is not the first school to offer gender affirming surgeries on its health care plan. Seventy-one schools across the country offer surgical procedures with their health care plan.

While Vanderbilt doesn’t have an especially big transgender student population, the school chose to include gender affirming surgery so the student health care plan could have full transgender health care instead of only offering hormone therapy, said Dr. Louise Hanson, the director of Vanderbilt’s student health center.

“We strive to offer all of our students, including transgender students, a comprehensive health insurance package that will allow them to make clinical decisions in consultation with their physicians,” Hanson said.

Though this is a dramatic change to health care for transgender students, school officials say that the difference in cost will be “pennies” for students.

Jesse Ehrenfeld, director of the LGBTI Program at Vanderbilt, said the minimal cost can be attributed to the smaller number of transgender-covered students, compared to the overall insured student pool.

Ehrenfeld also stressed the need for further steps to be taken for transgender health care.

“There’s still a tremendous education gap among health care workers as well as patients,” he said. “It takes doing that work in order for a system that was not created with trans people in mind to really start opening itself up to including trans people and serving trans people.”

The impact the expansion will have isn’t only physical — it’s mental as well, Robles said.

“As a transgender student, I can now access full healthcare at Vanderbilt,” Robles said. “I don’t have to put off my transition any longer. And that to me is life changing.”

Published on August 31, 2016 at 9:59 pm

Contact Kennedy: krose100@syr.edu | @KennedyRose001