Happy Pride!

Happy Pride!

David de Figueiredo, Lincoln Board Chair

June has been an important month for the LGBTQ+ community celebrating the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising as well as important Supreme Court verdicts affecting not only the LGBTQ+ community but all people. This year June has seen the intersection of the Pride and Black Lives Matter movements, opening the conversations about racial equity, civil rights, and health and well-being.

One health and well-being issue that potentially affects both movements is the discrimination rule the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published on June 19, 2020 scheduled to go into effect on August 18, 2020. The HHS discrimination rule purports to carve out LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable populations from the protections of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity, transgender status, or sex stereotypes. The present administration is using the HHS to target and hurt vulnerable communities that are already experiencing rates of discrimination in healthcare, particularly the transgender community. One of the attorneys for Lambda Legal, Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, said "While HHS’s health care discrimination rule cannot change the law, it creates chaos and confusion where there was once clarity about the right of everyone in our communities, and specifically transgender people, to receive health care free of discrimination". As a result, Lambda Legal and Steptoe & Johnson LLP filed a lawsuit challenging this discrimination rule. (The lawsuit for those interested is Whitman-Walker Clinic v. HHS)

What does this have to do with Lincoln? Everything. The repeated HHS attacks and this sort of discrimination have the very real potential for increasing the trauma Lincoln's youth, families, and staff are already experiencing, especially those who are or have family members who both identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ and the Black communities.

It is clear the conversations have to continue. As we endure the continuing restrictions that the COVID19 pandemic has necessitated, we can't lose sight of that.

I serve on the Board of Lambda Legal as Vice Chair, and I am Lincoln’s Chair of the Board. I am proud to be affiliated with both organizations.