Federal court rules Americans with Disabilities Act protects trans people from discrimination

United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Seal
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A federal court of appeals judge ruled Tuesday that transgender people are protected from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

As The Hill reports, the ruling stems from a 2020 lawsuit filed on behalf of a transgender woman who was incarcerated in a Virginia men’s prison despite the fact that she had been receiving hormone replacement therapy for nearly two decades.

Kesha Williams spent more than six months incarcerated alongside men and was periodically denied hormone therapy. After she was released in 2019, she sued Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, as well as a prison nurse and a deputy, alleging that the prison had violated both the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act in failing to treat her gender dysphoria.

While the 1990 law specifically excludes “transvestism,” “transsexualism,” and “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments,” the American Psychiatric Association has since replaced gender identity disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with gender dysphoria, which is the distress a person feels when their gender identity doesn’t align with their sex assigned at birth.

In an amicus brief, attorneys for the GLBT Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) explained that, “In short, the gender dysphoria diagnosis…

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