Healthcare for the Transgender Community

Abstract

The LGBTQ community has been growing and gaining more and more visibility throughout the US in recent years, however as they always say, there is still more work to be done. The transgender community, perhaps the most overlooked and discriminated against, has been in the spotlight lately. A stigma still very much exists, and that stigma contributes to widespread health inequality, among other things, in the transgender community both here in the US and around the world. Individuals who do not identify with the gender expectations that have been set by society more often than not have to go through a daunting number of health disparities when compared to those who identify within the gender binary. However, these disparities can be hard to identify and attach a real number to due to a scarcity of evidence that is specific to transgender individuals for a number of reasons that will be discussed later on. This study will look at how to improve access to healthcare for the transgender community. The challenges that affect both the health outcomes of gender-diverse people and their experiences in the healthcare industry are due to barriers that exist at several levels. Individual factors in patient-provider interactions including prejudice and lack of awareness or confidence negatively influence transgender people's access to and engagement with healthcare professionals. Institutional factors such as the binary description of gender used by medical systems leads to a lack of visibility of gender-diverse individuals, both within healthcare organizations and research. Policy and structural considerations including governmental focus, financial subsidies and public policy define the context in which gender-diverse people exist and interact with the healthcare system. All of these issues and more will be addressed in the upcoming pages, with the hope of evaluating what we need to do to improve transgender healthcare in the US and everywhere.