Jennifer Capasso, a 42-year-old transgender woman with stage four rectal cancer, filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center in New York City after she secretly recorded her surgical team allegedly making transphobic comments about her. MSK denied her accusations and said her recording violated worker privacy.

Capasso claimed that operating room staff preparing to remove her malignant lung tumor said that she had “man parts,” referred to her and her trans partner as “men,” and said that being trans was “not right” and “doesn’t make sense,” The New York Times reported, recounting accusations from a lawsuit she filed last March in New York’s Supreme Court.

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Capasso also said that during the March 7, 2022 procedure, an operating room nurse told a hospital administrator to change Capasso’s sex in her patient records from female to male. Capasso said this incorrect gender designation remained on her medical records until last January.

She recorded the alleged comments through her phone, which she placed in a nearby handbag during the procedure.

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She also claimed that her colorectal surgeon misgendered her during a June 2021 procedure. The surgeon’s behavior made her feel “unsafe and humiliated” with “heightened gender dysphoria,” she said.

If true, the hospital’s actions would violate New York City’s LGBTQ Health Care Bill of Rights, which requires healthcare workers to recognize, affirm, and document a patient’s “designated name and pronouns” in medical records.

In its court filings, MSK’s lawyers claimed that Capasso’s recording was “largely inaudible,” making it “impossible to ascertain the speakers or the full context of their discussion.”

“The secret recording captured portions of a discussion that occurred during surgery while plaintiff was under anesthesia in which staff members discussed plaintiff’s transgender status with every reasonable expectation that plaintiff would not hear this discussion,” MSK’s lawyers wrote.

A third of trans people reported negative experiences with health care providers, including verbal harassment or a refusal of care, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. A 2019 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that 83% of oncologists said they wanted to learn more about caring for trans patients. Only 37% felt they knew enough to adequately care for trans people as a whole.

Despite the accusations, Capasso said she continues to receive care at MSK because it’s one of the world’s best cancer hospitals.

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