Court rules that gender dysphoria is covered by Americans with Disabilities Act, in ‘huge win’ for trans people

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that people who experience gender dysphoria are protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, handing a “major win” to transgender people, according to LGBTQ rights advocates.

The first-of-its-kind ruling reverses a Virginia district court’s dismissal of claims brought by a transgender woman who alleged discrimination when she spent six months at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center.

Kesha Williams, who had been receiving hormone replacement therapy for nearly two decades, was wrongly incarcerated in a men’s detention facility and denied access to medical treatment for her gender dysphoria — a term defined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.”

She also faced persistent harassment by other inmates and prison deputies, according to court documents.

In 2020, Williams sued Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, as well as two other people connected to the prison, saying that her treatment was a violation of the ADA.

A district court initially dismissed the case, citing ADA’s explicit exclusion of “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments” from protection under the law.

Williams appealed, arguing that the language was outdated. The ADA was initially adopted in 1990, while the term “disorder” was replaced by “dysphoria” in 2013, in an update of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Last year, a friend-of-the-court brief co-authored by the GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) presented scientific research arguing that the ADA prohibits discrimination based on gender dysphoria and requires that the treatment of people with disabilities must be based on “reasoned and medically sound judgments.”

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the lower court’s dismissal.

“In sum, we hold that Williams has plausibly alleged that gender dysphoria does not fall within the ADA’s exclusion for ‘gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments,’” the ruling said.

“This is a huge win,” Jennifer Levi, transgender rights project director at GLAD said in a statement. “There is no principled reason to exclude transgender people from our federal civil rights laws ... This opinion goes a long way toward removing social and cultural barriers that keep people with treatable, but misunderstood, medical conditions from being able to thrive.”

Shannon Minter, NCLR’s legal director, also celebrated the historic ruling, saying that the decision “sets a powerful precedent that will be important for other courts considering this critical issue.”