TMI: The sweet taste of passing tests

I've got tests passing for my fix for #7879, making dependencies work more sensibly. I was proud of my voluminous status update for the past week, so it was a bit sad to only work on one bug today. It was a hard one, though, and I finished it! Aside from fixing tidy errors and such, anyway.

Amusingly/frustratingly enough, I did the real work over the weekend and the work I did today was almost completely centered around testability. I realized I can't use timestamps from stat() to ensure that a given file wasn't rebuilt. Someone else discovered this too: time granularity on Unix is only 1 second, so it's easy for two files that get created in quick succession, but sequentially, to have equal timestamps. Next idea was to compare hashes (which is what workcache already does!), but that won't do since if no dependencies have changed, but a file gets rebuilt anyway, it's likely to be bitwise identical. Jack suggested making the test case set the output to be read-only so that in case the second invocation of rustpkg tries to overwrite it, that would be an error. This required a little bit of fiddling due to details about conditions and tasks that I fought with before (see #9001), but the basic approach works.

So I can get a pull request in for this tomorrow, and happily, it's likely to fix several other bugs without additional work (or with minimal work): #7420, #9112, #8892, #9240, and I'm probably missing some.

Open Enrollment

The 2013-2014 summary of benefits for Mozilla's Anthem PPO insurance plan is missing one sentence that was in last year's version:

"Sex Transformation. Procedures or treatments to change characteristics of the body to those of the opposite sex."

(I'm not even going to talk about all the ways that that sentence does harm and is factually incorrect; feel free to point them out if you want to.)

Since the "procedures and treatments" the phrase clumsily attempts to designate are medically necessary, that was the only edit that needed to be made to make the plan non-discriminatory against trans people. If that sentence had been removed two years ago instead of now, I'd be in $15K of debt instead of $64K. I'd have been able to pay off all of my student loans.

I do not know whether all Anthem plans in California lack the problematic sentence as well. All health insurance plans in California (except for "health and life insurance plans" offered by out-of-state companies) are now required to cover any procedure for trans people that would be covered for cis people. But potentially, this still allows plans to exclude certain procedures that only trans people need. So I don't know whether Anthem is just doing the minimum that's legally necessary here, or whether Mozilla specially arranged for additional coverage. I also don't know what the situation is for US employees who work for Mozilla at offices outside of California.

But for me, this makes certain possibilities a lot easier, and more importantly, it means trans people who work for Mozilla, now and in the future, will know that their health care will be covered, just like that of their cis colleagues. It also means that one more company is setting an example for others to emulate of how to treat employees with respect.

It's an injustice that health care is a for-profit industry in the US and that access to good-quality coverage is usually tied to employment. But while we fight to change that, we can also break down the barriers that make trans people's lives harder and shorter. Removing trans exclusion clauses doesn't remove the barriers that exist for trans people obtaining housing or being considered fairly for employment -- particularly trans women facing intersecting oppressions. It doesn't decriminalize sex work or change how the prison-industrial complex oppresses trans women. But I still think that removing one continuous message that says that my friends and I just aren't as human as cis people are is a good thing.

ETA: I'm still not completely sure, but it appears that all Anthem Blue Cross plans in California will be trans-inclusive as of January 1, 2014. According to that blog post, employees in the US but outside California who are covered by a California-based employer's plan through Anthem will also have trans-inclusive benefits. The post seems to suggest that Anthem is going beyond the legal minimum by covering all transition-related care (though it sounds like there is still room for them to deny certain procedures, like facial surgery for trans women (which can be crucial for some people's mental health and personal safety) on the grounds that they are "cosmetic").