Redfern JS, Sinclair B. Improving health care encounters and communication with transgender patients. J. Commun. Healthc. 2014;7(1):25–40. [Accessed January 21, 2015]
Posting some of the reading I’m doing as part of #KPLantern (see: #KPLantern is beginning – Human Centered Insights into Transgender Person Health, to make it better | Ted Eytan, MD). Thanks to project sponsor Arli Christian, JD (@arlichristian) from the National Center of Transgender Equality (@TransEquality) for passing this my way, as a good sponsor does 🙂 .
Although gender dysphoria appears in DSM V, our perspective is that transgender identity is more of an ancient, persistent, and normal variation of human development rather than a mental pathology.
The paper does a really nice job of reviewing the changes in health profession attitudes over time, in surveys done in 1966, 1982, and 2010. Also, there’s a sample expansion of the sexual history that most physicians are trained on, to one that is “a patient’s sexual and gender identity history.” – see Table 5 in the paper.
The Prize – keeping eyes on it
The conclusion of the paper has a good list.
- promote equal access to and optimally deliver health care services for transgender people;
- foster a willingness of practitioners to embrace gender diversity, remove stigmatization of transgender people, and eradicate discrimination based on gender identity;
- ensure that practitioners offer the best possible care to their entire patient community; and
- promote awareness of transgender issues in the context of program development at medical schools and continuing medical education programs (CME).
I endorse it.