Promoting Agency and Action Through a School Project
Charlie B.
As students begin their final year at my middle school, the pinnacle unit between September and graduation is the “Capstone Unit.” Lasting more than six months of the school year in our Humanities class, this study project is a beast. It’s also an important practice in not only developing one’s own ideas, but also in learning to vet and validate information from various sources. Each student chooses a human rights issue on which to focus and writes an incredibly long (at least to an 8th grader) essay describing why the issue exists along with their own suggested solution to the problem.
A wonderful aspect of this project was the varying issues students choose to research – the gender wage gap (in the workplace, in professional sports, in relating to maternal leave); abortion rights; a woman’s right to education; reclamation of Native American lands; and many more deeply personal modern human rights problems. For my Capstone project, I chose to research transgender healthcare discrimination in the United States and wrote a policy paper outlining the issue as well as a proposed regulation meant to stop current injustices. I sent a final copy of my work, “The Transgender Health Protection Act of 2022,” to one of my state’s representatives (find yours here). In case you’d like to reach out to your representatives about this issue, here are some of the highlights from my research.
“In response to heightened rates of transgender hate crimes and a much tighter restriction on needed gender-affirming healthcare, Congress must take the needed steps to bring security to the lives of millions of valued American citizens. The Transgender Health Protection Act of 2022 will create strong-holding measures to ensure access to treatments, prevent repeated hate crimes in medical settings, require a doctor’s education, and cumulatively create comfort for transgender individuals seeking healthcare.”
The regulation I created outlines a database that would allow victims to report discrimination in any healthcare setting, investigate and prove/disprove the allegations, and record these discriminations onto a permanent transfer record of medical providers. This would prevent an offending individual from repeated transgressions in different places of work and would keep employers more aware of a person’s history and harmful ideologies. The connected action was a short transgender healthcare course included in a student’s medical school education. I learned in my research that less than a full day of study (an average of 5 hours) is dedicated to LGBT healthcare in 176 medical schools across North America (JAMA Network). This course aimed, as briefly as possible, to provide the content a future healthcare provider would really need to know in order to fully understand their transgender patients and as best to assist them. Many hate crimes against non-cisgendered people in medical settings are caused by a lack of education on transgender or gender diverse (TGD) patients. Doctors must learn the simple strategies required to care for these individuals in order to increase their comfortability in receiving their needed medical treatments.
In my research, I learned many facts about healthcare experiences for transgender people, such as:
Once they had been educated on transgender healthcare practices, future doctors felt far more comfortable in providing care to their patients. “Following the first 2 years, students reported a significant increase in willingness to care for transgender patients and a 67% decrease in discomfort with providing care to transgender patients.” (Park, Jason A., and Joshua D. Safer)
Transgender people are almost four times more likely than their cisgender peers to experience a mental health condition. (H.Res.507)
When provided with supportive and needed access to gender-affirming treatments, the mental health concerns of transgender patients noticeably dropped. Whereas half (50.4%) of individuals with reduced access to healthcare experienced depression or depressive symptoms, only 31.75% had it with their needed care. Anxiety sat at 45.8% of those without needed treatments and lowered to 27% when patients did have access. (NiH PubMed)
I really enjoyed this project because I truly care about the issue I chose; these issues affect me personally as well as the people I love. I think one of the most powerful parts of the assignment, and one of the things that made it so successful for all my classmates, was that we were allowed to choose a world problem that we personally cared about and felt invested in helping to solve. I hope that the discrimination against transgender people in healthcare will gain attention and receive action, and that powerful individuals and lawmakers can learn to value the voices of middle schoolers who really care (like me!).
Call to Action: Check out these organizations for more information about how to help!
World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH): https://www.wpath.org/
Mission: “To provide evidence based care, education, research, public policy, and respect in transgender health”
“Standards of Care” document:
A document with many varying topics in transgender healthcare that can provide doctors and students with information medical schools might not provide
Provides “Clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transgender and gender diverse people with safe and effective pathways”
Includes chapters on: adolescent care, surgeries, hormones, terminologies, education, mental health, and more
Global Education Institute (GEI):
Provides “certified training courses” to medical providers seeking education beyond the minimal awareness given in mainstream medical school education
Works Cited
Obedin-Maliver, Juno, MPH, et al. "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender–Related Content in Undergraduate Medical Education." JAMA Network, 7 Sept. 2011. JAMA, jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104294. Accessed 23 Apr. 2022.
Park, Jason A, and Joshua D Safer. "Clinical Exposure to Transgender Medicine Improves Students' Preparedness Above Levels Seen with Didactic Teaching Alone: A Key Addition to the Boston University Model for Teaching Transgender Healthcare." Transgender health vol. 3,1 10-16. 1 Jan. 2018, doi:10.1089/trgh.2017.0047
H.Res.507 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Condemning the Rise in Hate against the Transgender and Nonbinary Community" Congress.gov, Library of Congress, 28 June 2021, https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-resolution/507.
"Gender-affirming care, mental health, and economic stability in the time of COVID-19: A global cross-sectional study of transgender and non-binary people." Women's Health Weekly, 19 Nov. 2020. Gale in Context: Middle School, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A641871339/MSIC?u=dclib_main&sid=bookmark-MSIC&xid=18a9dc8c. Accessed 2 Feb. 2022.
