911, What Is The Nature Of Your Emergency?

When we call 911 we don’t know who will come to help and as the Trump administration is pushing the so called “religious freedom” legislation our worries are increasing.

Imagine this, you are on vacation or away on a business trip and you have to call 911, when the EMTs come and see that you’re trans raise their hands, saying sorry it is against their religion and walk away as you bleed out. It happened to Tyra Hunter in 1995 in Washington DC, she was in a car accident and the EMTs refused to treat her. In 1999 Robert Eads died of ovarian cancer because he could not find any doctors to treat him.

When doctors refuse to see transgender patients, the consequences can be dire
The Washington Post
By Laura Arrowsmith
November 26, 2017

Go back to California, the physician at a minor emergency center in a suburb of Tulsa told me. The words were flung — practically vomited — at me. I had gone to the center, a relatively new building that was beautifully decorated, on a Sunday morning in 2010 in terrible pain because of complications from surgery. The receptionist was pleasant, and the physician had entered the exam room smiling. He was about 50 years old and seemed friendly. But when I explained why I was there, the friendly smile quickly disappeared, and his face contorted into an expression of disgust and revulsion.
[…]
The doctor’s words reverberated in my head: “Go back to California.” He fled the exam room soon after he’d uttered them, without examining me or obtaining any further history.

It happens, even here in Connecticut. It happened to a trans woman who slipped and fell on an icy patch, in the emergency room she could hear the medical staff arguing about who was going to take care of “it.” She was told to go home and take a couple aspirin and see her doctor in the morning. Well it turned out that she fractured her back and hip, she walks with a cane today.

This has to change. No patient meeting a physician for the first time should fear being denied care or given incorrect treatment. The expression on a caring professional’s face should be one of concern and interest, not a snarl of angry disgust.

I volunteer at the Hartford Gay and Lesbian Health Collective on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and one of the things that they have is a medical database of LGBT friendly healthcare providers, which I wish wasn’t necessary but unfortunately it is.