Dominique's 2nd Media Review

What Doctors Should Know About Gender Identity

What is gender identity? Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with a person's assigned sex at birth or can differ from it. In this TED talk, Katie Overstreet provides an understanding for gender identity and invites us to change how we view transgender health care. In this essay, I will agree with Kristie Overstreet that doctors should begin creating a transgender-positive environment for their patients.

Dr. Overstreet when accessing a new patient, the patient confines in Dr. Overstreet that “Her fear was that the doctors that were going to be treating her would not treat her as her female self.” A doctor should treat transgender individuals with respect, as a doctor would for all of his and/or her patients. Doctors need to refer to transgender people by the name and pronoun associated with their gender identity. When starting an appointment doctors should ask politely how the patient would wish to be addressed if they are unsure about a person's gender identity.

I agree with Kristie Overstreet that it is important that health care providers get the proper training to be able to fulfill the health care needs for the LGBTQ community, in order to do no harm. Dr. Overstreet makes a very good point when she says, “Many doctors who say something inappropriate or they say something negative, they may not be coming from a malicious or mean place, they may have never been trained on how to care for these individuals.” She follows by saying this should not be an excuse anymore now that the population of the LGBTQ community has grown to 10 million people in the United States alone. As physicians receive better training, the transgender community will experience less fear, and build greater trust between the patients and physicians.

Most people might feel a wave of nervousness when actively thinking about an upcoming appointment. Then they may feel stress on the way to the doctor's office or while sitting in the waiting room. But if we look through the eyes transgender person it that wave of nervousness and stress might be 10 times worse because of the fear they have that they will not be treated as the person they are but as the person they were assigned from birth as. We should shift transgender healthcare so that everyone gets the respect and dignity they deserve when they go to a doctor.

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