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Doctors often aren’t trained on the preventive health care needs of gender-diverse people – as a result, many patients don’t get the care they need

Jenna Sizemore, Assistant Professor of Medicine, West Virginia University, The Conversation on

Published in Health & Fitness

Preventive health care – such as cancer screening – is a critical tool in the early detection of disease. Missed screening can result in a missed diagnosis, delayed treatment and reduced chances of survival.

But the medical system is poorly equipped to meet the needs of gender-diverse patients.

Around 1.64 million people in the U.S. identify as transgender, nonbinary or gender diverse – people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.

This adds up to 1.3 million or 0.5% of U.S. adults, all of whom are more likely to encounter implicit, or unconscious, biases when they seek medical care compared with their cisgender counterparts – those whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

I am a primary care doctor in Appalachia, as well as a medical educator who studies how to improve the instruction of future health care providers. I work hard every day to improve the health of the underserved.

Primary care doctors devote much of their lives to preventive medicine – the art of stopping disease before it starts. Cancer screening consumes much of my life.

 

So I’m concerned about the barriers to preventive care for patients who are transgender, including consistent access to adequate cancer screening.

Health care spaces and providers often focus on “men’s health” or “women’s health” specifically. Intake forms may have no option for declaring a gender identity separate from the sex assigned at birth. Health screening and insurance policies for diseases like cancer tend to remain geared to a flawed binary male-female model.

Gender-diverse patients often find themselves teaching their primary care doctors how to provide them with competent care, because many medical students get little training on providing gender-affirming care.

As a result, 1 out of 3 gender-diverse adults do not seek preventive care, according to a report by the National Center for Transgender Equality – or they are not offered these services at all – when they see a health care provider. Even more alarming, 19% of transgender folks report that they’ve been refused care altogether.

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