How I plan on connecting trans people to quality healthcare

TranshealthNC is a project that is really close to my heart. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to work on for a long time. TranshealthNC is a web application that includes an interactive map to help transgender people in North Carolina connect with quality healthcare professionals.

Here’s our problem.
It can often be difficult for trans people to find quality and experienced healthcare. It’s too common for trans people to find themselves having to educate their doctors on trans health issues. Many don’t make it to the doctor at all for fear of mistreatment. Others have difficulty finding doctors willing to treat them at all for specific transition related needs. According to a study by the National Center for Transgender Equality in the state of North Carolina 29% of trans people report being mistreated in hospitals, 26% did not see a doctor last year for fear of being mistreated, and 12% had a mental health professional try to stop them from being transgender.

So what do we do about it?
For those of you that don’t know, I’m a trans woman. I’ve had to deal with some of these issues first hand and know how difficult it can be. Our community acknowledges the problem, but our primary solution has been relying on word-of-mouth networks to recommend doctors and treatment centers to each other. Online blogs and forums help in certain situations but are limited, often out of date, and unreliable. I’m here to change that. By sourcing LGBT organizations throughout North Carolina I intend on gathering that word-of-mouth data on health care professionals across the the state. That data will be used to create a single online resource for transgender people to find community recommended healthcare as close as possible to them.

Hoooooow exactly do you intend to actually do that?
Oh, thank you, I’m glad you asked! I’ve done the majority of research on LGBT organizations in North Carolina already. Universities serve as excellent sources of transgender communities and their combined resources, unfortunately that information isn’t consistently accessible to those outside those communities. With my research we’ll make these resources available for everyone. I was able to find 140 colleges and universities throughout the state, of those 35 had LGBT groups that I was able to get contact information for. Beyond those, I found another 19 off-campus and local groups for a total 54 organizations spread across the state. I’ll use these groups to source information on members’ healthcare professionals and use that to begin the database. From there users will have access to both report and recommend doctors for the system.

I’ll be keeping the project updated here on Medium, so follow my publication to see it develop ^_^