The Ying And The Yang

As a community we have been calling for more therapists and healthcare providers, well the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is now experimenting with training certification. There have been a number of seminars around the country where they are doing training but it comes with mixed blessings.

Transgender Health: Best Practices in Medical and Mental Health Care
January 20-23, 2016

Omni Hotel Atlanta CNN Center
All participants will receive CME/CEU Credits. We are applying for APA credits which if approved will require an additional fee.  Once we have been approved we will send a link to anyone interested in receiving APA Credits.

This is from an earlier training seminar,

Many WPATH members, and transgender community members as well, have been asking WPATH to establish programmatic training for over a decade. The WPATH board of directors has approved moving forward with a certification program as part of our Global Education Initiative. Our vision for this program is to increase the number of trained providers worldwide, so that trans people can more easily find safe, compassionate, and competent care. In addition to our GEI committee of current volunteer faculty, we will be expanding our pool of trainers to represent the diversity of our membership. We will also be working with partner organizations globally, to increase our ability to reach providers of trans health services worldwide.

On the plus side:
We get more trained healthcare providers and therapist; we will no longer have to go looking for a “trans” therapist or an endo who knows about hormones.
We will no longer have to teach the healthcare provider. We will not have to rely the “trans” grapevine to find a healthcare provider. We will just have to look up a certified provider.

On the negative side:
The insurance companies will require us to go to a certified provider… sorry we cannot cover you hormones because you did not go to a certified therapists.
It could limit the number of health care providers that we could go to making it even harder to find a therapist or healthcare provider.

So what are your thoughts? Let’s start a discussion.