The Doctor’s Not In For You

I know of a number of trans people who were turned away by doctors because they are trans. Many of them are trans men who want to see a OB/GYN. This was posted on WPATH Facebook page the other day.

Doctors Refuse to Treat Trans Patients More Often Than You Think
New federal regulations are intended to help doctors refuse service based on religious or moral grounds. For trans patients, they may make a bad situation much worse.
VICE
By Keren Landman
January 29 2018

On January 18, the US Department of Health and Human Services proposed new regulations and announced the creation of a “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division,” both focused on supporting healthcare providers who refuse to perform certain healthcare services on religious or moral grounds.

"Not more of this shit," thought Marian, the mother of a transmasculine teen named Julian who lives in rural Georgia. (Marian chose to withhold her and Julian’s full names due to safety concerns.)

In 2016, Marian said a nurse practitioner in a local supermarket's walk-in health care clinic had repeatedly and intentionally misgendered Julian while administering his testosterone injection, asking, "What kind of a doctor would prescribe this to a girl?" As far as Marian could see, the provider’s disgust was evident—and a week later, the provider called to inform her there would be no staff available to perform the procedure in the clinic for Julian's next injection, suggesting they instead try a different clinic in a nearby town.

And a lot of times it depends upon where you live and who you are,

Not all transgender people are at equal risk for being excluded from or poorly treated in a healthcare environment. An analysis of responses to a 2008-9 survey of transgender people nationwide, found that people were at higher risk of being refused healthcare if they were transfeminine (i.e. assigned male gender at birth, but identifying and often presenting on the female side of the gender spectrum), identified as Native American or multiracial, or had low incomes.

Respondents living in southern and western states were more likely to report healthcare refusals, which might have been explained by regional variations in state politics: the more strongly Republican a state is, the more likely it was that their transgender residents had experienced healthcare refusal.

We are in an island of blue but that doesn’t mean that we are exempt from discrimination I know of a trans woman who was refused service in an emergency room at a local hospital when she slipped and fell on ice.

This morning I am having eye surgery, while this is not a concern for me because the surgeon is my eye doctor since the mid-seventies but for many trans this could be a major worry having a delicate medical procedure with surgeon and healthcare providers that they don’t and by providers that don’t know that they are trans.

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Update 2:15 PM
This morning I had minor out patient surgery and the entire staff was nice and friendly, no problems with being trans. When I was coming out of the anesthesia the anesthesiologist was talking to somebody and he said that there were no problems, she was sleeping when we wheeled her in to the operating room.