Brown University’s student health plan will cover sex changes (welcome matt is out)
Students at Brown University who decide they want to change genders will now be covered under the school’s generous student health insurance plan.
Beginning in August, Brown’s student health insurance plan will pay for more than a dozen different sexual reassignment surgery procedures, including scrotoplasty, labiaplasty, clitoroplasty and placement of testicular prostheses, reports The Brown Daily Herald. The plan as currently configured will cover only students, not staff.
“We identified this as an important benefit
for students to have access to,” Director of Insurance and Purchasing Services Jeanne Hebert wrote in an email to the school’s student newspaper. She added that the new health care benefit is part of a broader effort “to support all students” at Brown.
The total cost
for a single sexual reassignment surgery, including hormone therapy and various other physical alterations, can be as much as $50,000.
The newly-covered sexual reassignment procedures are “very standard and very comprehensive,” Kelly Garrett, Brown’s LGBTQ Center coordinator, told The Herald.
The LGBTQ Center does not keep any sort of statistics on the number of transgender students at Brown, or the number who would like to change their sexual characteristics. ...



