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Abstract
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Transgender youth face health disparities in suicidality, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Health care providers should advocate for upstream interventions to reduce suicide disparities, including Medicaid expansion, family acceptance therapy, improved access to name and gender marker changes, continuation of telehealth, and creation of trauma-informed schools.
Although transgender people are part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community, it is important to understand that transgender is not a sexual orientation and does not describe one person's attraction to another. Rather, transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender are gender identities: a person's deeply held, internal sense of their gender. Cisgender people identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. Transgender people identify with a sex other than the one assigned at birth. Nonbinary people reject the "gender binary," the social norm that divides reality between female and male. Because of the way the term LGBTQ has evolved to mean lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, it may seem confusing that a gender identity term (transgender) is included in an acronym that otherwise signifies sexual orientations (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer, or LGBQ). It is important to remember that people who are gender minorities--i.e., transgender or nonbinary--may also be sexual minorities--i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer--or they may be heterosexual.
The estimated portion of the population identifying as transgender is 0.6%, both nationally and in North Carolina [1]. There are projected to be about 44,750 transgender adults in North Carolina [1], and about 4650 transgender youth aged 13-17 in North Carolina [2]. Gender transition is a complex process that can involve social changes such as new terms of address and pronouns, medical changes such as hormone replacement therapy or surgical procedures, and legal changes such as name change and birth certificate updates. A transgender person may undergo some, all, or none of these changes, depending on how they understand their gender identity, other medical conditions they may have, and their access to the resources necessary to make these changes...
Language: en |