We have an article at Stat about the shortage of medical personnel at the 30-plus gender clinics scattered across the country...pointing out the 4 month waiting list at Chicago's Lurie Children's hospital and pediatrician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, who is treating 500 trans youth patients by herself.

What her patients share is the strong, almost certain, belief that they have been born into the wrong body. Their brains tell them they are one gender, their bodies another. Too often, Olson-Kennedy said, these kids have no one to help guide them or ease their pain or even offer routine medical care without disparaging them. “You sit in this room with these young people and see their distress so clearly,” said Olson, a 47-year-old California native. “It’s not OK to do nothing.”

So Olson-Kennedy battles. She fights with insurance companies, tangles with pediatric colleagues who think children are too young to transition, and persuades reluctant parents to help their distressed kids. She’s even taken on the authors of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” for not including a section on transgender children. And now, just as her fledgling field is beginning to gain medical and mainstream acceptance, she’s got a new adversary: President-elect Donald Trump, who many fear will erode the recent gains of the transgender community and cut access to the health care they need to transition.

And we have a call from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for ObGyns to create welcoming environments for transgender adolescents and to learn how to care for them.

These patients are going to be in our practice and we need to know what (their) salient issues are.

--Dr. Veronica Gomez-Lobo, Children's National Health System

Obstetricians and gynecologists need to address the gynecological needs of transgender patients in a sensitive manner.

They also need to address these youngsters' primary care issues or have them see other doctors who can address those issues.

The essential components of our role as health care providers do not change because an adolescent patient is transgender. Care should always include education about their bodies, deliberate and thoughtful assessment of symptoms or concerns, and preventive care services, like screenings and contraception. We are simply adding more nuanced cultural and medical understanding to those practices.

--Gomez-Lobo, co-author of an ACOG committee statement published December 21 in Obstetrics and Gynecology

And we have an article about how dismissive some doctors can be about the needs of transgender patients.

And we can, of course, count on a Texas court to obstruct any attempt to provide treatment of transgender youth in the new year.