Ensuring Transgender Employees' Privacy
Keep the employee's health status private and confidential, limited to the fewest people necessary and, to the extent possible, limited to Human Resources professionals. Even in these parameters, discussions about specific medical treatments or care should be limited to need-to-know information.
With few exceptions, employers do not need to know about a transgender employee's medical treatments beyond planning for potential medical leave for transitioning employees. However, some detailed conversations may become necessary in the process of attaining adequate insurance coverage from an employee health plan.
State and federal laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), govern the privacy of individual health information.[i] While healthcare providers and plans — rather than employers — are bound by the privacy obligations under HIPAA, more robust state laws, and a general interest in maintaining employee privacy, should discourage most inquiries into a transgender employee's medical status as well as disclosure of any voluntarily-provided health information to unnecessary staff.
Coworkers and Clients
Although the transgender status of an employee that transitions on the job becomes a more or less "public" matter, discussions about the employee's personal situation and medical treatment — including surgical procedures or hormone use — should be off-limits in the workplace.
Some transgender people may feel more comfortable having these frank discussions with their colleagues than others; having these discussions should be left to their discretion. Provide the employee with a standard statement such as: "Like other health matters, management has asked me to keep medical conversations to a minimum."
"When an employee is undergoing a transition that involves the cooperation of others in referring to him or her with the appropriate pronoun, the transition itself becomes a matter of public knowledge, but personal or intimate details about an individual's transition are the employee's personal business and as such are entitled to confidentiality. … No employee should be required to explain or justify her or his personal life or medical treatment in the workplace."
— Jamison Green, workplace diversity trainer and former member
of the HRC Business Council[ii]
When a transgender employee first begins employment with an employer, or moves to a different part of the same organization with new colleagues (such as a transfer from one state to another), that person may never have a need to disclose their transgender status to their employer
Employers should guide managers to ensure confidentiality in the event that they learn of an employee's transgender status from other sources in the normal course of doing business, rather than from the employee him or herself.
[i] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Secretary, "45 CFR Parts 160 and 164 Standards for Privacy and Individually Identifiable Health Information; Final Rule," Federal Register 67, no. 157, Aug. 14, 2002. Also available at: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/privrulepd.pdf.
[ii] Jamison Green, "Trans-Positive Workplace Policy Guidelines," National Center for Lesbian Rights, http://www.nclrights.org/publications/guidelines.htm. (Obtained 2004)
