Anna Kirkland

Examines civil rights protections from discrimination in the American health care system and in health care interactions, focusing on gender identity discrimination.  

Examines how efforts to prohibit gender-affirming care place physicians’ duties to avoid discrimination, protect privacy, meet standards of care, fulfill reporting requirements, and avoid committing crimes in direct conflict with one another.

Find that many hospitals treat discrimination complaints more like customer service problems than civil rights violations, which can weaken protections for patients facing discrimination.

Examined how insurance companies and health care systems define “medical necessity” for gender-affirming care, showing that unclear rules and inconsistent interpretations often create major barriers for transgender patients seeking treatment.

Shows how health care software and complaint systems can hide or minimize discrimination against transgender patients, making civil rights protections harder to enforce in practice.

Analyzes population data to show that researchers need better methods for counting and studying transgender populations, and that current estimates likely understate the true size and diversity of the community.

Argues that colleges and universities rely too heavily on complaint systems, legal compliance, and one-time trainings that do little to prevent sexual harassment. Instead, the authors call for evidence-based approaches that address campus culture, power imbalances, and the conditions that allow harassment to persist.

Shows how laws, insurance policies, and government regulations shape whether transgender people can get the care they need. The authors argue that stronger legal protections and broader insurance coverage are critical to reducing discrimination and improving access to gender-affirming care.

Draws on an analysis of every vaccine-related bill introduced in all 50 states from 1998 to 2012 to argue that the anti-vaccine movement has not had a major legislative victory since 2003, though the movement mobilized effectively to block adverse legislation until 2011. Predicts the 2015 California legislation restricting philosophical exemptions to school vaccine requirements.

Explores how activists and government actors come to know, identify, and compensate for vaccine injuries, and what recent debates over vaccine safety reveal about democratic engagement with volatile scientific questions in the contemporary United States.

Criticizes wellness programs in employment for their moralism and potential as drivers of discrimination, especially on the basis of disability, pregnancy, or weight, in the context of the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of wellness incentives and punitive measures.

Analyzes the underlying ideologies, political commitments, and organizational histories of the most prominent groups advocating against vaccination and for the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism.

Describes the claims in our no-fault vaccine court that vaccine caused autism in several representative test cases, detailing exactly how the scientific basis for the claims failed.

Analyzes discrimination law by asking, what if we wanted to add weight to anti-discrimination laws? Argues that while weight discrimination is unfair, our anti-discrimination laws do not provide very robust grounds for protections because they are so individualized, difficult to use, and limited in scope.