Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, a world-leading provider of Gender Affirming Healthcare (GAH) services, has given us a first glimpse at images of its dedicated surgery clinical office. As one of the first of its kind in the US, the Surgical Care Center will be dedicated to providing the highest quality advanced surgical care for trans and gender diverse people.
Thank you to Mount Sinai NYC for more investment to improve the healthcare and patient experience for our trans and gender diverse patients
– Joshua Safer Executive Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery
At a time when, across the globe, access to gender affirming therapies and surgeries is often severely limited by a lack of funding, and hostile political discourse, it’s particularly heartening to see a major investment of this nature.
For many Trans and gender diverse people surgeries are an important part of their journey to affirm their gender, and as such they deserve timely surgical options. However worldwide, and in the UK in particular, they too often face barriers that mean they are left waiting years for procedures that tend to be much more easily accessible to cisgender people.
Recently members of trans rights campaign group Trans Actual hand-delivered an open letter to NHS Health Secretary Sajid Javid demanding that he urgently put measures in place to address the continued failure of the NHS to provide vital phalloplasty and metoidioplasty surgeries to trans men and non-binary people. Those needing these surgeries have been left without any provision since the NHS withdrew a contract to perform these surgeries without putting alternative provision in place.
Despite the desire of excellent surgeons like Ioannis Ntanos doing their very best to ensure that trans and gender diverse people are treated with respect and empathy, getting funding and authorisation for gender affirming surgeries remains notoriously difficult.
Meaningful and urgent improvements to a struggling system are a priority, and those in the NHS responsible would do well to look to the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery for inspiration.
Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash