Dr. Christine McGinn was senior flight surgeon at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station, north of Philadelphia. Once upon a time she was flight surgeon for two NASA space shuttle missions.
She was interviewed by Michael Smerconish on CNN.
McGinn transitioned beginning in 2000. She now operates the Papillon Center in New Hope, PA, which offers comprehensive gender reassignment services.
The American Medical Association on Monday announced a new set of policies to better "inform and educate the medical community and the public on the medical spectrum of gender identity."
New research has been performed at the Boston Medical Center which reveals that most trans patients do not elect to undergo gender affirming surgeries.
The study followed 99 transgender patients who were undergoing hormone therapy at BMC, the majority of whom were transgender women.
Medication misadventures, a quaint term. Sounds like one is going on a trip with a few unexpected twists and turns, resulting in an entertaining story. Reality is a little harsher. In 1995 the economic cost of medication misadventures was quantified at $76.5 billion annually.
The Wall Street Journal shares the news that gender affirmation surgery is becoming more available as more hospitals provide the procedure and more insurance comapanies provide coverage.
Not content with challenging the right of transgender people to have safe use of public restrooms and the right of transgender students to have equal access to public education, religious conservatives have now filed suit challenging an Obama administration ruling that transgender people deserve equal access to medical treatment.
This past Tuesday the Council of the District of Columbia unanimously and with little fanfare passed B21-168, the LGBTQ Cultural Competency Continuing Education Amendment Act. When signed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, he district will be the first jurisdiction in the nation to require LGBTQ cultural competency training for all health care providers.
The bill sets a modest but needed floor for such training by requiring any health care professional who is required to receive continuing education to include at least two credits of LGBTQ-related clinical or cultural competency training.
Anti-transgender forces like Breitbart or Lifesite or Family Research Council like to drag out ancient transphobe Dr. Paul McHugh, the man who shut down the nation's leading gender clinic at Johns Hopkins because he thought gender non-conformity was a "lifestyle choice" or notorious ex-transwoman Walt Heyer to prove that treatment of gender dysphoria does not and cannot work.
The latest from Breitbart:
But medical students at Georgetown and other schools are being forced-marched though the post-modern, post-scientific ideological swamps of vanity politics instead of spending their precious time learning actual medicine.
You see, treatment of transgender people is not actually medicine.
Their purpose, of course, is to erase transgender people from the community of human beings. How very Christian of them.
Last Tuesday court-appointed receiver who has managed health care for California prisons under federal court order since the Scwarzenegger administration announced new guidelines which authorize surgical procedures for transgender inmates suffering from severe gender dysphoria who desire surgery.
The guidelines call for panels of state health professionals to review appeals for sex-reassignment surgery from inmates whose doctors say their patients are under significant distress because of a mental condition known as gender dysphoria. The inmate must have been taking hormones for at least a year and have consistently expressed a desire to change his or her biological gender before an operation can be approved.
Prison officials have estimated the cost of the state-funded operations as high as $100,000. But the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, which has represented two inmates in suits against the state, says each operation would cost $15,000 to $30,000.
California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says it has about 385 transgender inmates, most of them male-to-female, who are currently undergoing hormone therapy.
The Journal of the American Medical Association's online Medical column for October is Laura Buchholz' Transgender Care Moves Into the Mainstream
Despite the name of the article, Ms Buchholz highlights the difficulty transgender people have in obtaining competent medical care.
Trans people have been excluded from medical care, and their issues have been deemed not medical and not important.
--Joseph Freund, MD, a primary care physician at Franklin Family Practice in Des Moines, Iowa
Dr Freund recounted his struggles with insurance companies over reimbursement for transgender care, yet another barrier that transgender patients encounter.
