Just Read: Doing the Right Thing for Trans Health is Now Easier Than You Think

One of my professional colleagues, Dana Beyer, MD (@DanaBeyerMD), wrote this beautiful column in the Huffington Post recently (Doing the Right Thing for Trans Health is Now Easier Than You Think | Huffington Post).

It describes the numerous protections that transgender people now have when it comes to receiving equitable, medically supervised care. A lot of physicians and care providers I encounter are not aware of these protections. Sometimes it’s the opposite – they feel UNprotected in providing science-based care to people in this population.

Dana disspels much of the myths around this. It was once believed that providing care to this population was risky, for social or other reasons, especially in the Southern US. The landscape has changed so much, and is especially more protective in the South (read the column), that the risky thing to do is to not provide this care.

We’ve won so many victories, but our failure to promote those victories and in so doing change the culture at a fundamental level limits the impact of each success, as well as offends those who risked so much to get us there in the first place. When we should be grateful, we remain silent. When we should be promoting success and empowering our community, we let them remain in the dark.

We get to thank this President, Lyndon B Johnson, for changing our century to make it so much more lovable than the one before it…

And let us not just think about laws, think about organizations, who also now enforce the idea that not providing this care is also now the wrong thing to do.

By the way, reading this column made me reflect on my read of Sheryl Sandberg’s book and her mention of men having mentors who are women. I do have a mentor who is a woman. Her name is Dana 🙂 .