The Coronavirus Crisis Is Getting Serious

The Republican Party, Donald Trump and peeps in the conservative movement have been treating the justified alarm over the COVID-19 virus as a joke for the last few weeks.

Orange Foolius called it a 'hoax' and a 'foreign virus' that would die out soon as FOX Noise and conservative commentators tried to put their propaganda spin on it.   But viruses are impervious to political spin and don't care what party you support.

They aren't laughing anymore.   The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the COVID- 19 crisis a 'pandemic with over 128,000 confirmed cases on six continents.  That is a declaration they don't make lightly. 

We have entire nations like Italy on lockdown as they struggle to get a handle on an outbreak that has killed more than 1000 people there with over 13,000 cases reported..

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's wife Sophie has tested positive for COVID-19, and PM Trudeau himself is on a 14 day self quarantine. 

In the US, 46 states and the District of Columbia have confirmed cases, with so far 40 deaths.
I also found it deliciously ironic that several peeps who attended CPAC, the huge conservative political convention held in the Washington DC area, have tested positive for COVID-19.

That list of CPAC attendees who got sick includes several Republican legislators.

Trump's precious stock market has lost the entire $11.5 trillion dollars it gained since 45 became (yuck) POTUS, and we are now in our first bear market since the October 2008 financial crisis.

We may even be sliding toward another Great Depression because of his gross incompetence

In addition to that. every major sports league, the NBA, NHL, MLB, MLS, the NWSL and the XFL  has either postponed or canceled their seasons due to COVID 19 concerns.   The NCAA has not only canceled the men's and women's basketball tournaments, they have canceled all spring sports championships.

The Disney parks in Florida, California and Paris are now closed, and Princess Cruise Lines have shut down all voyages for at least the next two months.

Even Broadway is dimming its lights along with the world famous Apollo Theater, shutting down all plays and events until April.

Closer to my Lone Star State home, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which is a huge event here, canceled on Wednesday with 11 days left in its 2020 run.  A Fort Bend County patron who attended the February 28 BBQ cookoff along with an off duty Patton Village police officer tested positive for COVID 19. 

The UIL boys state championship that started yesterday today in San Antonio's Alamodome has been suspended indefinitely.

It will be interesting to see if Pride events that are scheduled for June will also be canceled or postponed.

Conferences are either canceling outright or deciding to do remote events,  schools from the K-12 to the collegiate level are closing, and unfortunately because Team Trump grossly botched how they handled this crisis, people are dying.

Because Orange Foolius has lied since Day One of his mispresidency, he has zero credibility when he does open his mouth.   Truth and facts are your greatest allies when it comes to fighting the spread of a pandemic, and those are both nonexistent in the Trump White House.

And where are the 'millions' of COVID-19 tests the Trump misadminstration promised?   Seems like as usual the peeps with money can get them, but the general public has been slow to receive them.


Yes, this COVID-19 crisis is getting serious.   So what can you do to help slow down the spread of it?
Wash your hands frequently with soap and water for starters along with frequently touched surfaces in your home like light switches, counter tops and sinks.

All the closings and postponements are part of a social distancing strategy in the hopes of slowing down or stopping the spread of COVID-19 and by extension, save lives.

It's also to buy more time until a vaccine or a combination of drugs that work on it can be found.

Will the social distancing work?  Let's hope and pray it does.

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WPATH Conference Starts Today

The 25th biennial World Professional Association for Transgender Health Conference (WPATH) is starting today in Buenos Aires, Argentina and running through November 6.

So what is WPATH?   It is a professional association headquartered in the United States devoted to the study and treatment of gender dysphoria, that was formerly known as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. 

 

Its mission is to promote evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy, and respect in transgender health.  In addition to medical professionals and trans activists, other attendees include people working in the fields of psychology, law, social work, counseling, psychotherapy, family studies, sociology, anthropology, speech and voice therapy and sexology.

Non professionals in those fields are also welcome to join WPATH, but don't have voting privileges in the organization.

With trans communities in the US, Great Britain and elsewhere facing unprecedented facts free attacks on their humanity and human rights, this conference is happening in Argentina at a crucial time in our community's history.

Argentina has also been a leader in the last few years in passing trans supportive human rights policies and laws.

Good luck to everyone traveling to Buenos Aires for this conference, and may they all return to their home nations better informed on trans medical issues and the issues of importance to trans communities around the world.

2016 Transgender Day Of Resources & Healthy Living This Saturday

One of the things that is a problem for many trans folks is not only getting affordable regular medical care, but medical care that is culturally competent.


It was a void that Dee Dee Watters and Transgender Women of Color United for Change (TWCUC) sought to address with the inaugural event in November 2014 that not only was a success with over 100 attendees, it probably saved my life.

While killing time waiting for a panel to start, I decided since I'd been through some extremely stressful drama with a family member to give the TSU medical students a little practice in checking blood pressure.  I hadn't been to the doctor on a regular basis in several years, and when those smiling students put the cuff on me, I discovered that my blood pressure was highly elevated enough to where if it had gone unchecked, it could have produced a stroke.

Stroke is what killed my father in 2013, and it alarmed me to the point that I started making arrangements over the next few weeks to go back to the doctor on a regular basis, get back on my hormones, and drop some weight since I was tipping the scales at 275 pounds at the time and unhappy about it.   I was also close to being in Type II diabetes territory, and wanted no part of that either. .

I've dropped 40 pounds since then, clear of the Type II diabetic zone, and shooting to drop another 20 pounds and keep it off.  I'm also happier since I'm back on my hormones now.

It's why I'm enthusiastically supporting the 2016 edition of the Transgender Day Of Resources & Healthy Living which is geared specifically for the Houston area transgender and gender nonconforming community.

This is a free event for all who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming people and those who love them.

The purpose of this event is to provide a safe space where those who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming can gain access to knowledge for healthier living and much needed resources and workshops geared to assist people to navigate their transition journey in a safe and healthy way.
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Some of the workshops that will be available during this event running from 10 AM-3 PM will cover name and gender marker changes and plastic surgery.

TDORHL2016 will take place this Saturday as I mentioned from 10-3 PM at the Montrose Center, so come check it out Houston area trans fam and allies.   It could save your life like it did mine and put you on the path to healthier living.   

Seattle Trans Woman Sues Blood Bank

Because I have an AB+ blood type, from time to time I would take part in blood drives when the need arose.

But after my 1994 transition, I could no longer donate blood because the US Food and Drug Administration uses a policy they implemented in 1983 that treats trans men and trans women as gay males having sex with other males (MSM's) and permanently bars us from donating blood.

While the FDA is considering new donation  guidelines for gay and bisexual men, they still haven't as yet come up with guidelines that would allow trans people to do so.

Well, a legal case percolating in Washington state may force the FDA to speed up their timetable for doing so.

Jasmine Kaiser attempted to give plasma in exchange for money at CSL Plasma, Inc in Kent, WA but was told because she was assigned male at birth she could not donate.   She was also told by CSL workers she'd be placed on a 'permanent deferral list' and they would inform other blood banks of this status.

Since Washington state has had a law on the books since 2006 prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity,.Kaiser filed suit against CSL with attorneys from Seattle women's rights group Legal Voice and the Keller Rohrback law firm arguing that CSL violated the Washington non discrimination law
CSL Plasma, Inc is also facing a similar lawsuit from another trans person in Minnesota.

They have yet to respond to the Kaiser suit, but according to the Advocate a spokesperson stated that CSL "operates its business in accordance with all applicable industry, state, federal, and international laws, regulations, guidelines, and guidance documents."

Will be interesting to see how this case transpires.

Stuff Just Got Real With The ICD-11 Revision

With the outrage building is the international trans community about our Russian peeps being under attack with the BS driving ban, something unfamiliar to many US based trans folks but central to this oppressive drama has come to our attention in the USA.

The UN's World Health Organization puts out every few years the International Classification of Diseases or ICD Manual.

The ICD-10 was endorsed by the Forty-third World Health Assembly in May 1990 and has been used in WHO Member states since 1994.  

So why is the ICD important?  The ICD is not only the standard diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes, it is used by physicians, nurses, other providers, researchers, health information managers and coders, health information technology workers, policy-makers, insurers and patient organizations to classify diseases and other health problems recorded on many types of health and vital records, including death certificates and health records.

In addition to enabling the storage and retrieval of diagnostic information for clinical, epidemiological and quality purposes, these records also provide the basis for the compilation of national mortality and morbidity statistics by WHO Member States. Finally, ICD is used for reimbursement and resource allocation decision-making by countries.

Translation:  insurance companies use it for coding purposes, too.

And as witnessed in Russia recently, the ICD has been used to attack and pathologize the trans community for decades.   As Dr. Kelley Winters, who tracks these issues on her GID Reform blog said on my Facebook page on January 10: 

"They've been used every day to attack us, for generations, by conservative bigots on the right and Raymondites (TERFS) on the left. Gender reparative psychotherapies are still practiced from the Clarke Institute (CAMH) in Toronto, to private practices and "religious counselors" in every state. Countless more trans children are shamed into the closets of their birth assignments by parents, doctors, shrinks, school administrators and school counselors, based on these bigoted and scientifically baseless diagnostic policies. Leelah was just one of many youth who lost their lives to the stigma and false stereotypes promoted by these policies."

Homosexuality was removed from the ICD in 1990, and trans people in several nations including Canada's Jenna Talackova have been pushing to have the same thing happen for transsexuality in the ICD-11, which is currently being revised.   It is scheduled to be released in 2017.

The World Professional Assn for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the American Psychological Assn. (APA) have also called for the depathologization of transsexuality.

According to Dr. Winters, this is what is currently happening in those ICD-11 efforts.

"The current plan of record for the ICD-11 is mostly good news-- to eliminate trans related (transsexualism, GID, GID-childhood, and transvestic) categories from the mental disorders chapter (chapter 5/ F-codes) and replace them with non-mental codings, named Gender Incongruence, in a new chapter on Sexual Health (chapter 6). Gender Incongruence of Adults and Adolescents (GIAA) will be used to facilitate access to hormonal and/or surgical transition care for those who need it -I support this new category, though I think its descriptive text needs clarification and more age flexibility (for adolescents who may need access to blockers or medical care before Tanner Stage 2 characteristics are outwardly visible." "A second new category proposed for the ICD-11, Gender Incongruence in Childhood (GIC) is controversial. Since children do not get hormonal or surgical treatment and need no coding for them, there is no clear benefit of a pathology coding for trans (including socially transitioning) children. Yet the stigma of pathology/defectiveness and the torture of consequence gender-conversion/gender-reparative psychotherapies puts their lives at risk. Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE) has proposed a less harmful alternative proposal to replace the GIC coding in the ICD-11. My own opinion is that there should be no GIC childhood coding in the ICD-11 and that the alternative GATE proposal (I helped define it) should be implemented instead."

So as you can see, the revisions to the ICD-11 are of critical importance to us in the USA and the international trans community not only in terms of our human rights fight.

It is also a fight to assert our very humanity as trans people in the face of increasingly organized efforts by the Southern Baptist Church, right wing politicians and the TERF's to deny it

Hey Trans Men, Wake Forest Scientists Create Human Penis In Lab

One of the ongoing truisms we'll say in the trans community that relates to bottom surgery for our trans brothers goes like this:

'Trans men got the blessing of instant passability, but their bottom surgery sucks.'

While medical science has long been able for decades to create aesthetically authentic looking genitalia for trans women, so far that has been problematic enough for our trans brothers to the point many forgo the genital surgery.

But that may be about to change thanks to news of a. medical technology breakthrough that may change that for trans men and cis men who have lost their genitalia for whatever reason.

In 2009 urological surgeon Dr. Anthony Atala the director of the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and his colleagues attached a bioengineered penis to 12 male rabbits.   When those rabbits mated, 8 had successful ejaculations and 4 produced offspring.

With the successful animal trials completed, they have now moved up the evolutionary ladder and are working to do the same for human males

Atala's technique is to use a donor penis, soak it in enzymes that remove the donor cells, then use cells from the patient so they have a biologically functioning penis.   Once the organ has grown strong enough, it is then attached to the patient.

What is needed is someone to do the first human transplant test to know if the technique is viable, and Atala's team expects that to happen in the next five years.

As for whether it  would work for our trans brothers, there are pro and con arguments so far, but the only way we will know for sure is once the technique is perfected or medical science comes up with a better solution.   And as fast as medical technology has been evolving lately, it may be sooner rather than later.

But a long held dream of the trans masculine community that wishes it in terms of realistic and functional penis may become a reality within the next ten to years.

Moni Goes To Legacy

Spent a couple of hours this afternoon in the gayborhood at the invitation of Antonio Aguires speaking to a group of employees at Legacy Montrose Clinic.

My task for the hour was to discuss health issues, how they impact the trans community, and what we look for from the providers who wish to serve our community.  

It was one of the reasons I asked that question on my FB page in order to have a wide sampling of community opinions to do some hard, solid thinking about before I walked into the building Friday afternoon to discuss this issue. 

After a problematic incident with a trans patient a few months ago, Legacy is trying to address the problem that occurred by doing more training with its staff and the people who work there about our community and the issues we face. 

I started the talk a little after 1 PM CDT with this quote from the late Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) in which she stated during a 1970 congressional speech, "Health is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased."

I touched on some of the history of trans medicine.   I discussed Dr Magnus Hirschfeld and his Berlin institute for Sexual Research that was raided by the Nazis in 1933 and had its books and archives burned, touched briefly on Christine Jorgensen, the local gender clinic in Galveston that was founded in the early 1970's before shifting gears and tying all of this to the current day state of trans medicine and our expectations as the community Legacy seeks to respectfully serve. 

The point I wanted to drive home with the people in attendance is we trans people not only want to be seen as the men and women we are, when we come to you for medical services, we want to be treated with the same dignity and respect you'd demand for yourselves . 

I pointed out in addition to local advocates, there were also emerging online links about the subject of respectful trans medical care they could peruse as well from various organizations like WPATH, Lambda Legal, Transgender Education Network of Texas  (TENT),  TransHealth Coordinators,  and the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health just to name a few. 

I spoke for 45 minutes, then allowed another 15 minutes for questions before it concluded. 

Haven't gotten any feedback yet from Legacy in terms of the reactions from the people in attendance for this lunchtime conversation.  But I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did, took away from it something about my trans community they may not have been aware of before and it leads to the goal we all want of better health outcomes and delivery of respectful medical care for the Houston area trans community.   

23rd WPATH Biennial Symposium Starts Today

The World Professional Association For Transgender Health (WPATH) is gathered together in Bangkok, Thailand for their 23rd Biennial Symposium in the Land of Smiles from February 14-18 (Thailand time)

The WPATH Symposium's purpose is to present professionals working in the field of transgender health with the latest advances in research, education, clinical service, and advocacy to promote the health and well being of trans people and their families. 

You know, all that research on trans issues our haters claim doesn't exist or they wish to ignore.

The WPATH Symposium scientific program addresses topics in several areas including primary care, psychiatry, endocrinology, and surgery; psychology, social work, marriage and family therapy; sociology and anthropology; gender and sexuality; speech and voice therapy; and other related fields relevant to transgender health.  Professionals, clinicians, researchers, and academics were invited to submit before the start of the conference relevant abstracts.

The symposium will also have a variety of special panels, paper presentations, poster sessions and speakers, including some on the following topics: Children, families, and youth; ethnic/racial and cultural diversity in transgender health; transition-related services; community-based health care and community-participatory research; transgenderism in sports; legal & human rights; and the latest advances in brain research.

The theme of this 23rd WPATH Biennial Symposium is 'Transgender Health From Global Perspectives' and there are a record 523 registrants for the conference from 39 nations headed to the event from every corner of our planet to the conferences host hotel at the Anantara Bangkok Riverside Hotel.

From H-town to take part in this premier symposium on transgender health issues will be Dr. Colt Keo-Meier and the head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Transgender Civil Rights Project and TPOCC founder Kylar Broadus will be in the WPATH house for it as well.  

When they arrive in Bangkok, they will witness plenary speakers covering topics such as Development of Sex-Reassignment Surgery in Thailand, with Preecha Tiewtranon MD; Experience of Uterus Transplantation From Mothers to Daughters, with Liza Johannesson MD, PhD; Co-Dependency as a Way of Life, with Louis Gooren MD; ICD Plenary, moderated by Gail Knudson MD; The Brain of Transsexual Persons, with Antonio Guillamon MD; and A Brief History of the Thai Kathoey: Behind the Myths and Stereotypes, with Peter Jackson PhD.Q

One of the concerns of the international trans community is next year's scheduled May 2015 World Health Organization ICD-11 revision and the recently released DSM-V one as it relates to gender diagnoses.  That subject will be addressed during the time these transgender health professionals are gathered in Bangkok.

WPATH has already called for depathologization, but just in case you missed it:

The WPATH Board of Directors strongly urges the de-psychopathologisation of gender variance worldwide. The expression of gender characteristics, including identities, that are not stereotypically associated with one’s assigned sex at birth is a common and culturally-diverse human phenomenon which should not be judged as inherently pathological or negative. The psychopathologlization of gender characteristics and identities reinforces or can prompt stigma, making prejudice and discrimination more likely, rendering transgender and transsexual people more vulnerable to social and legal marginalization and exclusion, and increasing risks to mental and physical well-being. WPATH urges governmental and medical professional organizations to review their policies and practices to eliminate stigma toward gender-variant people.

It is going to be an exciting, informative upcoming four days in Bangkok. 

Breast Cancer Study For Transpeeps On HRT

Since it's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I was curious to find out if any studies had been done to see if there were any effects for transmasculine and transfeminine people on HRT and the prevalence of breast cancer. 

To answer the question I'd been pondering, yes there is.  There's a new study from Netherlands examining the prevalence of breast cancer in transgender people.

Gooren et al found that trans women and trans men who have had hormone therapy may be at the same level of risk for breast cancer as cis men.

For trans women, the development of breasts and increase in breast tissue might increase their risk for breast cancer. Trans women also receive estrogen and/or progesterone, which may affect an estrogen or progesterone sensitive cancer.

This study’s authors found 8 cases of breast cancer in trans women in the medical literature, ranging from 1968 to 2013. Three of those cases appeared not to be related to hormones. The other five occurred within 5-10 years of starting hormone therapy. These cases also follow the (cis women) pattern of ductal carcinomas being the most common cancer.

Of course, bear in mind that these stats are for the Netherlands, and the United States has a far larger population of trans peeps.  

If that's the case, this initial study is relatively good news, but more research still needs to be done top cross check the results of this one before we can definitely be certain that what they discovered in the Dutch study is true across the trans population in general.   

More Than Just XX Or XY Chromosomes

One of the things that makes me laugh my butt off whenever I see it in a comments section I decide to peruse to gauge the ignorance in is when the scientifically illiterate trans bigots start braying that 'XX chromosomes equals female' and 'XY equals male'.

I'm hearing trans bigots spew that far too often in their attacks on Fallon Fox (and other trans women) and I'm sick of it.

FYI trans bigots.  As we transpeople are a living testament to, Mother Nature doesn't like nice neat gender binaries.   She likes to throw you curve balls, which is why I like to constantly remind people who spout that ignorant jibber-jabber that transpeople are part of the diverse mosaic of human life.

It's why we transwomen can come out of the womb with a masculine body and a female mind and gender ID.  The reverse is true for our trans brothers who have the masculine mind and gender ID but the body stayed female.

But back to the chromosome issue I wanted to shed some light on. 

There's XO, Turner Syndrome in which a female has only one X chromosome. A female bodied person can also be XY due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS).  Men can have an extra X chromosome due to Klinefelter's syndrome, which means they have an XXY.   

There are also some of you alleged cismasculine he-man transwoman haters who are walking around this planet with XX chromosomes.  There's also XXX, XYY, XXXX, XXYY....

Are your heads spinning yet?   Oh yeah, the only way you are going to find out what somebody's chromosomal makeup is damned sure not by looking at their outward gender presentation or the genitalia between their legs and making loud and wrong assumptions about it.   It requires you to do lab testing to find out for certain. 

Human beings are far more complex than the gender binary allows.  The existence of humans in all their biodiverse configurations is making that crystal clear as the mounting scientific research continues to point out. 

Pregnant Turkish Woman With Uterine Transplant Draws Interest In Trans Community

Jazz in a recent interview expressed the hope and desire to become a mother.   If medical events in Turkey continue to be positive, she and other girls like us might get the chance to have her own child with a transplanted womb.

Back in August 2011 doctors successfully transplanted a donor uterus from a deceased woman into now 22 year old Derya Cert, a Turkish woman born without one but who had functioning ovaries.   Being born without a uterus affects one in every 5000 women and until this procedure came along meant that the woman in question would be childless. 

A uterus transplant has been attempted once before by a medical team in Saudi Arabia back in 2000.  The womb came from a live donor but failed after 99 days due to heavy blood clotting and was removed from the patient receiving it.    Medical centers in Sweden and the United States are also working on perfecting uterine transplant medical technology and the medical procedures and drugs necessary to prevent the body from rejecting the transplanted organ.

Cert became the first woman in the world to have a successful transplant from a deceased woman, which raises the hopes of women that are in a similar situation to hers that they could one day undergo the procedure once the techniques are refined and give birth to their own biological children.

On April 1 Cert had an embryo implanted into her developed from one of her own eggs.  It has been confirmed that she is now pregnant    The embryo should it countinue to develop will be delevered by Ceasarean section.

Where the interest comes from in the trans feminine community is on multiple levels.  We know that Lili Elbe's death was caused by a uterine transplant done on her back in 1931 because she wanted to be able to have children. 

There are trans teens like Jazz who would love to someday become mothers, and if this technology is perfected by the time they reach adulthood, we'd have one of those situations we brainstormed about and we saw once upon a time as an impossible dream now becoming a possibility due to modern microsurgical techniques. 

We've long wistfully expressed the sentiment in transworld if only trans men and trans women could swap body parts.  It's becoming increasingly possible that a trans man when having the hysterectomy could designate it be donated to a trans woman for implantation.

But if they did so, this is a situation in which cis privilege would aggressively assert itself.  If that trans man donated their uterus, it would probably get prioritized toward being given to a cis woman without one.   Trans women would be extremely far down the transplant list despite the desires of some of us to be fruitful an multiply.    

That research is also geared at this time toward helping infertile couples, not giving trans women the ability to give birth to biological children of their own

But that shouldn't stop us from doing hard solid thinking about reproductive rights issues, procreation and the potentially game altering way that uterine transplant medical technology that hones its procedures and becomes as common as heart and other organ transplants could one day be applied to trans women. .

The trans community definitely needs to be having these conversations about where we fit in this equation and think about what happens if they perfect uterine transplants.  Could testicular ones be on the horizon next? 

In the interim, cis and trans world will definitely be watching developments in Turkey as Derya Cert's historic pregnancy comes to a hopefully successful conclusion.

Deja Vu Trans EMS Death In New York?

In 1995 I was horrified to hear the story of 24 year old Washington DC trans woman Tyra Hunter, who died at the hands of a transphobic EMT and a doctor who let their transphobia override their obligation and duty to provide medical care in her hour of need.

Once again I'm stunned to hear about another case happening in which a New York EMS technician is alleged to have not done his duty and allowed a trans woman to die after going into diabetic shock.

This case happened back on June 15, 2012 in New York, but we're just now hearing about what happened to 30 year old Shaun Smith because her mother Jenette Cox has filed a lawsuit alleging that EMS responders let her child die because she was trans. .

Smith started her transition and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in 2010.  She purchased estrogen, progesterone and spironolactone online and was taking them without consulting a physician.

It is alleged that after Smith complained of shortness of breath to her mother, Cox told Smith she would get her sneakers so they could go to the emergency room.  When Cox returned she found Smith unresponsive and called 911.  The ambulance arrived on the scene 10 minutes later, the EMS responders took Smith's pulse but said there was nothing they could do, according to Cox. 

Cox repeatedly asked why they were not trying to revive Smith. "They didn’t even open their equipment to try to work on him,” said Cox in the interview with the Sheepshead Bites blog. “They didn’t do nothing for my son.”

The EMS responders declared Smith dead at 4:42 AM EDT.  Court papers state Smith, who had no history of diabetes, died of diabetic ketoacidosis, which results from a shortage of insulin.

“This is somebody who needed urgent care and didn’t get it, and basically what stopped them were breasts on an originally male body,” said Ilya Novofastovsky, the attorney representing Cox in the malpractice and discrimination case against the NYPD and the FDNY, which operates the EMS.

Novofastovsky said discrimination against transgender people by emergency responders and medical workers is a nationwide problem that causes a delay or absence of care, and leads to additional suffering and even death for the patient.

Novofastovsky and Cox also named Harlem Hospital in their lawsuit, which Smith checked into on December 2011, complaining about a headache from having taken “too many diet pills,” according to the hospital report.  The medical report includes the hormones that Smith was taking at the time.

Novofastovsky alleges the hospital was also discriminatory in caring for Smith, having sent her to the mental health clinic rather than given medical care, where they might have discovered the onset of diabetes.

He points to the report from the visit, which diagnosis Smith with an “unspecified, drug induced mental disorder.”

I've written about medical transphobia and the stories of trans people who have had less than pleasant experiences not only accessing health care, but with first responders or medical personnel.  This isn't the first time less than respectful treatment of transpeople by first responders has happened in the Big Apple as this  ugly November 24,1998 incident involving transwoman Jolea Lamot bears witness to. 

It also points to the fact there is an ongoing need for Trans 101 education and training across all sectors for the medical community from medical and nursing schools to first responders and medical assistants in order to avoid another Tyra Hunter incident that could unnecessarily cost another transperson their life. 

Jenna's Video On The WHO ICD-11 Change.org Petition

Jenna Talackova is on a mission along with transpeople around the world to get Gender Identity Disorder removed from the next edition World Health Organization's ICD manual. 

The International Classification of Diseases manual fight is important because insurance companies use ICD diagnostic codes when it comes time to bill for medical services performed.  The upcoming renaming of Gender Identity Disorder to the proposed 'Gender Dysphoria'  in the imminent publication of the DSM-V manual has also led to international trans activist efforts to get this done before the projected ICD-11 publishing date in 2015.

Here's Jenna's video and a link to her petition calling on the WHO to remove GID from the ICD-11 .. 

Jenna Takes On The WHO's ICD Manual

After taking on Donald Trump and the Miss Universe organization and winning the right to compete in the Miss Universe organization pageants for herself and other trans women starting in 2013,  Jenna Talackova is combating a bigger target.: The World Health Organization.

Specifically Talackova is targeting the WHO's listing of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) in the UN body’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) manual..  

The ICD is in its tenth edition and is used by doctors around the world.  Talackova has launched an online Change.org petition with the goal of getting the UN-based organization to remove GID from the ICD list of mental disorders.

The ICD-10 was endorsed by the Forty-third World Health Assembly in May 1990 and has been used in WHO Member states since 1994.

Homosexuality was removed from the ICD list in 1990 and the calls for the WHO to do the same for transsexuality have been getting louder in light of the fact that the ICD's 11th revision of the classifications has already started and will continue until 2015.

The May 2013 publishing date of the DSM-V manual in which 'Gender Dysphoria' has been proposed as the term to rename Gender Identity Disorder and it's being moved into its own category out of the Sexual Disorders one has also been an impetus for pushing the ICD change.  This is also important because insurance companies use ICD diagnostic codes when it comes time to bill for medical services performed. 

In addition to Jenna's Change.org petition that has over 31,000 signatures at the time I compiled this post, there is a similar petition from Maxwell Zachs that also has over 31,000 signatures calling for the same thing.   There is also an International Day of Action for Trans Depathologization being planned for October 20 to continue to push the WHO and other medical organizations to cease considering trans people as mentally ill.

It's a direction that France took in 2010 when it became the first country to remove transsexuality from its list of mental disorders.    The European Parliament in a September 28, 2011 resolution called for the WHO to withdraw gender identity disorders from the list of mental and behavoral disorders, and to ensure a non-pathologising reclassification in the negotiations on the 11th version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)

Organizations such as the APA and the World Professional Organization for Transgender Health have also called for depathologization

The WPATH Board of Directors strongly urges the de-psychopathologisation of gender variance worldwide. The expression of gender characteristics, including identities, that are not stereotypically associated with one’s assigned sex at birth is a common and culturally-diverse human phenomenon which should not be judged as inherently pathological or negative. The psychopathologlization of gender characteristics and identities reinforces or can prompt stigma, making prejudice and discrimination more likely, rendering transgender and transsexual people more vulnerable to social and legal marginalization and exclusion, and increasing risks to mental and physical well-being. WPATH urges governmental and medical professional organizations to review their policies and practices to eliminate stigma toward gender-variant people.

My position is similar to WPATH.  Eliminate the stigma, but also ensure that GID removal is replaced with medical protocols and practices that allow for non-stigmatized health care access for trans people.

Only time will tell if the international trans community is success at getting GID removed from the 11th edition of the ICD, but thanks to Jenna and many other trans people and their allies around the world the momentum to make that change happen is starting.