Last week I joined over a hundred other attendees at the Trans Health Matters conference in London. The event (which takes place on a mostly annual basis) was organised by cliniQ, the city’s holistic trans sexual health clinic.

For impressions of the day, you can visit the Twitter hashtag for the event here.

When I attended the first cliniQ Trans Health Matters conference in 2013, I found it to be immensely valuable and informative, but left with a feeling of deep-seated distress that persisted pretty much ever since. For at that event, I gained a better understanding of the scale of the problems that plague trans healthcare provision.

These include widespread ignorance and often also active discrimination from practitioners, plus enormous (and growing) waiting lists for gender clinics. All things I already knew about, but swapping notes with other researchers and activists helped me realise just how common and severe the issues were. My impressions from the conference were also reflected in the initial findings from my PhD fieldwork, which I was undertaking at the time.

By contrast, I left this year’s event with a greater sense of optimism and hope.

That’s not to say that trans health isn’t still a disaster area. It really is. However, I feel that since 2013, there has been a real growth in community health initiatives, and also in cis practitioners’ active engagement in the issues. This was actively reflected in the conference programme, which focused largely on what is being done and what we can do to make things better.

What is “trans health”?

Interestingly, another positive aspect of the conference for me was that gender clinics and transition processes were barely discussed at Trans Health Matters 2017.

That isn’t to say that these aren’t important things to talk about – they absolutely are – but one of my observations over the last few years has been that discussions of “trans health” focus so overwhelmingly on gender identity services that an outside observer would be forgiven for thinking that transition is the only healthcare issue that really exists for trans people.

Which, of course, would be completely wrong. Trans people face extremely high rates of discrimination, harassment, internalised stigma, poverty, physical violence and domestic abuse. These challenges can be be linked to endemic mental health problems, suicidality, substance abuse, “risky” sexual practices and disability within trans populations. Moreover, there is the matter of everyday transphobia and cisgenderism in everyday encounters with healthcare practitioners.

So it was genuinely refreshing to attend a trans health conference that focused largely on sexual health (particularly HIV prevention, reflecting cliniQ’s role as a sexual health clinic), with some additional discussion of matters such as therapy, sex work, data collection, and intersectionality. These are all deeply important issues that really deserve the attention they received on the day.

Of course, the absence of discussion on gender identity services would be a real issue if these conversations weren’t already happening elsewhere. But they are. This year alone, I’ve attended two UK trans health conferences which centred issues of transition, and I know there have been plenty of other such events that I haven’t been able to go to. This is another cause for optimism: a great increase in activist, academic and professional events looking at trans health from a range of angles, reflecting the rapid growth and increasing visibility of our communities.

Towards inclusive care

While there are a growing number of trans-specific sexual health services available in UK cities, it was really good to see a lot of discussion around how trans people can be included in services (and the promotion of these services) more generally. A great example of this was a short film that’s been made about PrEP, from which extracts were shown at the conference.

I was also really heartened to see that Trans Health Matters was a somewhat more intersectional affair this year. Two of the four speakers on the keynote panel were trans women of colour. We got to hear a particularly inspiring speech from Mexican/US activist Alexandra Rodríguez, who explained how she created a pioneering HIV prevention service for trans Latinas in California after realising there were no existing services, and reflected on the importance of providing care and support for trans migrants.

I also attended an afternoon session on barriers to access and strategies for inclusion for some of the most vulnerable trans populations in the UK: black and minority ethnic trans people, non-British trans people, and economically marginalised trans people (these are, of course, groups that frequently intersect!)

Barriers to healthcare access for BAME and/or non-British trans people.
Photos taken with permission during breakout session.

One of the most important lessons from this session was the importance of reaching out for service providers, rather than expecting that the most marginalised people will feel that a service is necessarily for them. This is particularly the case if a service is normally primarily attended by and promoted to a relatively privileged demographic.

The work of reaching out may involve an element of discomfort for white and/or middle class providers; it can involve sensitively negotiating access to new spaces (e.g. club nights and community groups run by and for people of colour and/or working class people), learning from mistakes and being open to listen and learn with humility. But it is vital to ensure that community services are truly inclusive.

Reproductive health survey

The importance of the work of inclusion really came to the fore in a plenary session where we were shown initial findings from a trans reproductive health survey undertaken by Public Health England.

The survey is still open: you can take it here.

This is the first major stastical study looking at trans people’s reproductive health and experience of services in the UK. As the survey hasn’t yet closed and the data still requires some additional processing, we were asked not to report on specific figures. However, what I can say is that (unsurprisingly) there were generally high levels of dissatisfaction with existing service providers and sexual health education, reflecting an urgent need for improvement and trans inclusion.

The aspect of the survey that inspired the most discussion and debate amongst conference attendees, however, was the lack of diversity among existing survey respondents. A majority of respondents had received a university education, and an overwhelming number were white. This reflects a wider trend in trans community responses to online surveys: it is the most privileged individuals who are more likely have access to these.

I asked the speaker if there had been a paper version of the survey produced: these can help obtain a greater number of responses from individuals less likely to access an Internet survey, including trans people of colour, working class trans people, and older trans people. He noted that unfortunately the research team (which I believe consists just of himself and a single support worker) are underfunded and are trying to do their best with the resources they have. However, other audience members noted that there were still things that could have been done to increase the response rate from underrepresented groups. For instance, the research team could have reached out to UK Black Pride and asked for help with dissemination.

To me, this conversation really brings home the importance of active inclusion, which was the main thing I have been thinking about since attending Trans Health Matters. We can’t just assume that all members of our communities will be able to access services and research: rather, we need to make the effort to ensure that they are accessible. This can involve additional work, but the real challenge is overcoming the ignorance that can arise from our own privilege, even if we are ourselves marginalised in different ways.