Doctor's Rec: WPATH Standards of Care for “Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People”

The overall goal of the SOC is to provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transsexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming people with safe and effective pathways to achieving lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, in order to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment. This assistance may include primary care, gynecologic and urologic care, reproductive options, voice and communication therapy, mental health services (e.g., assessment, counseling, psychotherapy), and hormonal and surgical treatments.

While this is primarily a document for health professionals, the SOC may also be used by individuals, their families, and social institutions to understand how they can assist with promoting optimal health for members of this diverse population.

Kaiser Permanente Transgender Care follows the WPATH standards of care and the 2009 Endocrine Society Guidelines, as well as a companion document for voice and communication change. Click through to access this file in 18 different languages.

Research documents school staff tend to blame victim of anti-LGBT harassment, incl. removing from school, when perpetrators face minor consequences. (Bochenek & Brown 2001)

Many people experiencing discrimination have encountered “victim-blaming” where the solution to the hate crime is to remove the identity being persecuted. Suppose a woman might have been told her attire “invited” sexual assault or even rape. Suppose a gay teen is told to stop “flaunting” their lifestyle choice, often by teachers and administrators in positions of trust and protection, when they report violence and daily harassment in the classroom. Suppose a recent immigrant is told that once they “learn English”, classmates will stop stealing his things and urinating on his book bag.

Only when teachers and administrators take risks to establish honest conversations that proactively support inclusion and affirm the expressive diversity of all people on campus (including students who feel the need to bully and abuse others) can we create genuinely safe spaces.

In addition to highlighting the inaction of teachers and other school staff, Daniel’s story illustrates the tendency among some school staff to ‘blame the victim’ in cases of anti-LGBT harassment, as other researchers have noted.

In Hatred in the Hallways, authors Michael Bochenek and A. Widney Brown cite situations in which LGBT students were removed from classrooms and even schools as a '“solution” to their having been harassed (while the perpetrators faced minor consequences), as well as one in which an assistant principal reportedly said of a student who had been harassed, “If he didn’t walk around telling people that he’s gay, there wouldn’t be any problems.”

Reference

• Michael Bochenek and A. Widney Brown, Hatred in the Hallways: Violence and Discrimination against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Students in US Schools (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001), 83.

• Michael Sadowski, ed., Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2015), 125.