It Is Not Rocket Science

Our healthcare is not that hard to understand, there is nothing special about our needs, it is pretty much just standard treatments for common aliments just applied to us.

Hormones? There is nothing fancy about our dosage it is basically the same as anyone with an endocrine disorder. Blockers are also nothing special, spiro has been around since just after World War II so basically doctors have the knowledge to treat us.

Should Doctors Be Certified To Treat Trans Patients?
Inside the struggle to make doctors’ offices more inclusive.
Huffington Post
By Keren Landman, M.D.
May 8, 2017

When Chaslyn Heath first started looking for someone to prescribe her estrogen in her west Georgia town of Carrollton in 2014, she ran into a few dead ends. Then 16, she had identified as transgender for three years. She asked her pediatrician for help, and he put her in touch with a local therapist.

But during their first session, says Heath, the therapist demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the origins and realities of being transgender: She asked if someone was persuading Heath to transition, if she’d gotten the idea from seeing Caitlyn Jenner come out, or if perhaps she was just confused.
[…]
Many health care providers are unable to provide high quality care to transgender people, whether due to a lack of education or exposure, or due to their own biases, but are nevertheless called on to treat transgender patients, both for general health concerns and for trans-related issues.
[…]
With so much at stake, how can a person determine how trans-competent a doctor might be? There is currently no clear answer, but a leading organization hopes that might soon change.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is doing training around the country for therapist and healthcare providers and they give a certificate for those who complete the seminar.

Now, they hope to offer a formal accreditation in transgender-competent care – something WPATH’s members have asked for, says Donna Kelly, the director of the organization’s education programs.


The formal program would require 35 additional hours of classroom and clinical work, passing an exam, two years of membership in WPATH, and an additional undisclosed fee. Currently, the certification exam is in the process of being vetted by specialists, but organizers hope to offer its first set of certifications within the year.


But is a certification necessary? Not everyone who works in transgender health agrees.
Here is where we get to the meat of the problem.

Indeed, some doctors who are otherwise trans-inclusive view a potential certification as an onerous requirement. Jeremi Carswell, medical director of Gender Management Services at Boston Children’s Hospital, says her first reaction to a certification process is, “that’s something else I have to do. More money...a burden.”

The medical aspects of transgender care are not complicated, Carswell says, adding they could be taught using an online training module. And, she says, the most important aspects of care – cultural competence issues like addressing people by their preferred names and pronouns – would be covered under more general LGBTQ training.

Ah… so what’s the problem?

Well as the article points out “that’s something else I have to do. More money...a burden” and also the insurance companies have caught on and some of them are requiring our letters for surgery and health care come from “certified” healthcare providers. In other words the therapist and doctor we have been seeing for years will not be able to give us a letter for our GCS we will have to hunt out a new therapist and healthcare provider that is certified.

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An interesting discussion is taking place about Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and insurance companies about how they deal with trans people, one brand of EMR only lets the doctor only code us with F64.1 “Dual Role Transvestism” it doesn’t recognize “Gender Dysphoria” this happened because the company that owns the EMR program hasn’t updated it to the new ICD-10 codes so when they code it to F64.0 Transsexualism it doesn’t get processed by the insurance companies.