Say Ah…

One of our concerns is healthcare, are we getting the best healthcare or are we just getting lip service?

Making Primary Care Trans-Friendly
The medical knowledge needed to treat transgender people is not particularly complex, but patients still often struggle to find doctors who are prepared to treat them.
The Atlantic
By Keren Landman
April 21, 2017

Two days after the 2016 presidential election, Isabel Lowell appeared on a panel at the Georgia Academy of Family Physicians annual meeting in midtown Atlanta. As a family physician who sees transgender patients, Lowell was leading a full day of training on providing trans-competent care. When not speaking, she sat in the back of the room next to her wife and new baby.

The mood of the room was grim, but lightened when another panelist wistfully described her fantasy: a multidisciplinary health center dedicated to transgender health, where patients would visit for a day-long lineup of appointments with reproductive, preventive, mental-health, and surgical specialists, all focused on transgender issues.

Inwardly, Lowell bristled. “I used to think that was the gold standard,” she said afterward. “Transgender patients could just go [to these clinics] and get everything they need. I think it’s wonderful in theory, but … it lets everyone else off the hook. It makes it this special ‘other’ thing that you have to go to a special center for.”

Transgender care should be primary care, she thinks. It should require no special center, and unless a procedure is needed, no specialists.

“Any doctor should be able to do this,” she said.

More healthcare providers and therapist are starting to learn the needs of our community, from cultural competency to our special healthcare needs.

Medical colleges are also starting to provider training, a couple of weeks ago I did training at a local medical school for their first year medical students and I know hospitals are also giving training to their staff.

And sometimes, providers focus on someone’s trans identity way too much. In 2015, writer Naith Payton wrote about the “trans broken arm”: “‘In the five minutes it takes … to grill me on gender stuff and write it all down, the orthopod has squandered a quarter of the time they’ve got to fix my broken arm,’” a transgender patient told Payton.

“The more a person’s trans status is blamed for a person’s unrelated health problems, the less likely they are to bring it up—even when it is relevant,” Payton writes.

That is one that I brought up in the classes at the med school, if the patient is there for something that does not involve healthcare related to transitioning or being trans then don’t ask questions about their surgery or other trans health issues. If you do need to ask question about their trans status then tell them the reason why you are asking.

So we are making progress but there is dark clouds on the horizon; a leaked draft of a Trump Executive Order indicates that they are going to give special rights to certain religious group to discriminate against us.

From the draft it looks like anyone receiving federal funds has to allow their employees to discriminate against and that could supersede state laws! It could mean disaster for us! Hospitals, EMTs, doctors, clerks, and all other private businesses that have a federal contract can refuse to treat us, care for us, rent to us, sell to us or even work with us.