Should Doctors Be Certified To Treat Trans Patients?

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. “I knew that I wasn’t confused,” she says. “I just wanted to walk out of her office.” She searched for other local mental health providers, but none returned her calls. Desperately wanting to start hormones and unsure of where to turn, she was devastated. 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. It’s unclear how often doctors are treating transgender patients without appropriate training or experience, but trust of physicians is low among many transgender people: In a 2015 survey nearly a quarter of transgender respondents in the U.S. reported not seeking care due to fear of being mistrea...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news