HRC Foundation Sues Trump Administration Over Federal Workers' Gender-Affirming Care Ban

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation filed a federal class action lawsuit on August 3 against the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management, taking a fight over transgender federal workers’ healthcare into court after eight months of trying to resolve it through administrative channels.

What the policy actually did

The case centers on a carrier letter OPM sent to health insurers at the start of the year, directing them to stop covering gender-affirming care under the Federal Employee Health Benefits program and the Postal Service Health Benefits program. The policy took effect January 1, 2026, and applies to federal employees and their dependents nationwide — a population the Williams Institute estimates includes at least 39,400 current and former federal workers and family members who could lose access to medically necessary care as a result.

Practically, that means a federal employee who was covered for hormone therapy, or whose transgender teenager was covered for care under a family plan, lost that coverage on the same terms as everyone else in the federal workforce loses coverage for any other medical treatment: without an individual determination that the treatment wasn’t medically necessary, simply because of a blanket category exclusion.

Eight months, two filings

HRC Foundation didn’t go straight to court. The organization, working with the law firm Correia & Puth, first filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on February 3, arguing the coverage exclusion amounts to sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — the same legal theory that underlies most employment-discrimination protections for transgender workers post-Bostock. Under federal process, the EEOC then had 180 days to act on the complaint before plaintiffs could take it to court on their own.

That window closed without resolution, and on August 3, HRC Foundation filed the class action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “We’ll see you in court,” HRC Foundation President Kelley Robinson said in a statement announcing the filing. Earlier this year, when the organization filed its initial EEOC complaint, Robinson put the administration’s intent in blunter terms: “The Trump administration is weaponizing medical care to push transgender public servants and their families out of their jobs.”

The argument

The lawsuit’s core claim is straightforward: denying coverage for a category of care that only transgender employees and dependents need is a form of sex discrimination, because it singles out treatment based on a person’s transgender status specifically. Courts have increasingly accepted versions of this argument in the years since the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision extended Title VII’s sex-discrimination protections to cover gender identity and sexual orientation in the employment context — though this case tests how far that logic extends into employer-sponsored health coverage specifically for the federal workforce.

If the case proceeds as a certified class action, it would cover not just the named plaintiffs but the full population of affected federal employees and dependents, potentially forcing OPM to restore coverage across FEHB and PSHB plans rather than resolving individual complaints one at a time.

Where it fits

This is one piece of a broader pattern of federal policy changes affecting transgender people that we’ve tracked this year, from HIV prevention funding cuts to shifts inside federal agencies. The distinguishing feature of this case is who it targets: not a broad public policy question, but the federal government’s own employees, using its leverage as the country’s largest employer to remove a specific benefit from workers who need it. HRC Foundation is posting case updates at hrc.org/fehb-class-action as the litigation moves forward.