Monday, April 22, 2013

Trans Health & Law Conference

Well the correct name is a mouthful, Transgender Lives: The Intersection of Health and Law Conference, but everyone just calls it the Transgender Health and Law Conference. Anyhow, it is this weekend and it culminates nine months of planning where every year we say that we are not going to be rushing at the last minute, but every year we are rushing at the last minute.

This is our seventh year and it is my seventh year working on the conference. For the first conference I was just an adviser because it was the work of the Executive Director of the Hartford Gay and Lesbian Health Collective. She was a graduate student at UConn where she was working towards her Masters of Public Health and the conference was her class project and she asked CTAC to be her advisors (Afterward we had the honor of questioning her at her dissertation of her master's thesis). I also used the conference as part of my education for my Masters in Social Work, for one of my term papers I wrote this about the conference,
Hypothesis:
If a conference is given, where both the professional healthcare givers and transgender individuals can meet and attend workshops together, a synergy of learning will take place where both groups will gain a greater knowledge than if the conferences were held separately.
That is our goal, that by bring together all the communities, the healthcare community, the legal community and the trans*community, it will bring about a greater understanding for all groups. Because there are a number of conferences where healthcare or law for trans*people is covered, but I don't know of any other conference that is both health and law.

Each year the conference has grown for the last couple of years we have been offering Continuing Educational Credits (CECs) which has helped a lot to increase the stature of the conference with the healthcare professionals.

For more information on the conference, you can visit our website for workshop information, presenters bios, the program guide and the workshop schedule.

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