npr:

When Sgt. Anna Lange moved with her young family from Columbus, Ga., to the state’s more rural Houston County, her main priority was being able to stay near her son.

After five years of marriage — and many more years of internal turmoil — Lange had realized that despite being assigned male at birth, she’d felt female her entire life.

She had decided to undergo gender transition and knew it would eventually end her marriage. She also knew her soon-to-be ex-wife would want to move back home to Houston County, an hour and a half’s drive from Columbus.

“I wasn’t going to be that far from my son,” Lange said. “It wasn’t like I was thinking of, you know, the super-open community,” she said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

Although she’d loved working at the police department in Columbus, she took a job with a national insurance company in Houston County, hoping for a more accepting, less conservative environment than law enforcement.

She found the corporate structure so stifling, she didn’t even make it out of training. Within three months, she was once more wearing a badge and gun as a patrol officer at the Houston County Sheriff’s Office. She’s been there since 2006 and has been promoted twice.

That’s why it stung so much when she learned late last fall that the county’s employee health insurance plan wouldn’t cover any of her transition-related surgery. Although federal law prohibits health insurance plans from discriminating against transgender individuals, the plan adopted by Houston County specifically excludes trans-related health care from coverage.

Fresh Challenges To State Exclusions On Transgender Health Coverage

Photo: Audra Melton for NPR