Dr. Meacher: In the LGBT community, something we are very familiar with both pre-pandemic and especially during the pandemic is that some of our patients are extremely reticent to go anywhere except our health center. In a pandemic, that was just the same. They just felt really, really uncomfortable going anywhere except to us.
To illustrate the point, I tell a story about something that happened to me when I was in the South Bronx. You have to imagine a busy community health center waiting room. Patients sign in and then the nurse would call them back. I had started building a practice for transgender and gender non-binary patients. I had a patient who was a trans woman who presented dressed as a woman and her whole identity was female. Yet her insurance card had not been changed, because at that time it was very difficult to change legal gender.
Unfortunately, we had not realized all of the things that make the experience for a transgender person really difficult in our health systems. On the sign-in there was no option to say, “This is my insurance name, but this is the name I go by.” So, the nurse called the patient to the back with a male name. This individual had to stand up, walk across the room and go to the back. Now, you might instantly think that felt really awful and humiliating, but it’s much more than that. Violence against transgender people is many, many fold more [common] than in the general population.
I have no idea who else was in that waiting room who might have taken issue with this individual, who might have waited outside for them when they left. You can understand why many people will only go to a medical home they trust such as Callen-Lorde and will delay getting really important medical care elsewhere.