Trans Day of Remembrance Talk and a Partnership with Lifelines Rhode Island: Addressing Trans Health Care
11/13/2007

At The Warren Alpert Medical School, LGBTQ issues are handled primarily by GLAAM (Gays, Lesbians and Allies Advancing Medicine). This past year, AMSA co-sponsored a Trans Day of Remembrance talk and is also trying to establish learning and volunteer opportunities for students at the local trans advocacy organization, Lifelines Rhode Island.

In planning the Trans Day of Remembrance talk for GLAAM, I wanted to include AMSA in co-sponsorship to remind AMSA members that health care issues faced by people of trans experience are also part of AMSA’s advocacy purview.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) was set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. The day is held in November to honor Rita Hester, whose murder in 1998 kicked off the Remembering the Dead web project and a San Francisco candlelight vigil in 1999. Since then, the event has grown to encompass memorials in dozens of cities across the world.

A Boston-based trans poet and activist joined us on Nov. 13th in honor of TDoR and spoke about the role of physicians in the larger movement for justice for trans people who are at increased risk of violence, avoidance of preventative healthcare and inadequate care in the medical system.

Our speaker’s talk helped educate physicians in training on what it means to be transgender and how this state of being is different from the behaviors and conditions that are wrongly thought of and misdiagnosed as transgender. She and I both agree that physicians need to grasp the transgender experience in terms of its medical definition, the emotions/stresses that shape the experience, the threats to safety that some individuals feel, and the tension between self and society (how transgendered individuals adapt to or resist societal/familial expectations). We hoped that her audience would come away with a better understanding of the difficult, but inspiring journeys individuals embark on to find harmony between mind and body.

As a follow-up to this talk, I have sought to establish a relationship between AMSA/GLAAM and Lifelines Rhode Island. Founded in 2006, Lifelines is, according to the organization’s website, “the only statewide, multi-service nonprofit organization focused on meeting the needs of transgender, transsexual, Two Spirit, gender variant, and intersex (TGI) people in Rhode Island and surrounding regions.” Scouting out the possibilities for AMSA members to get involved at Lifelines, I attended sensitivity training sessions there and have tried to advertise these sessions to AMSA members. Through these trainings, I learned about the range of stresses trans people experience when interacting with the health system: a person who is legally male may encounter billing issues at the gynecologist or office staff who give the patient a hard time, patients are physically abused and ridiculed in hospitals, and children who assert their true gender identities may be met with coercive treatments by psychiatrists. One of my projects this summer is working with Lifelines members and allies to organize an HIV testing event for the local trans community, and I am working to facilitate the scheduling training sessions at local ERs and psychiatry departments. Next year, I’d like to recruit a couple other AMSA members who’d be interested in participating in the Advocates Program, which allows volunteers to attend medical visits with patients who have come to Lifelines for assistance.

See http://glaam.blogspot.com/ for more on LGBTQ activism at Brown Med.

- KH