What doctors should know about gender identity | Kristie Overstreet

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2018

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kristie Overstreet is on a mission to ensure that the transgender community gets their health care needs met. In this informative, myth-busting talk, she provides a primer for understanding gender identity and invites us to shift how we view transgender health care -- so that everyone gets the respect and dignity they deserve when they go to a doctor.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features clinical sexologist and psychotherapist Christy Overstreet, recorded live at TEDx-Lavonia CC Library, 2017.
0:12.3	About six months into my career as a therapist, I was working at a drug and alcohol rehab facility.
0:18.7	I got a call from one of the nurses down the detox unit. She asked me to
0:22.9	come down and assess one of the new patients that had arrived earlier in the day. So I went down to the
0:28.1	unit and had the pleasure of me in hand, and the transmitter of female. And as her and I started
0:33.4	talking, she was sharing with me about what brought her into treatment. But I could hear this fear in her voice, and I could see this worrying her eyes.
0:41.3	And she began to tell me that she didn't fear coming into rehab and having to give up drugs and alcohol.
0:47.1	Her fear was that the doctors that were going to be treating her would not treat her as her female self.
0:53.0	She then told me about this ongoing pain that she has experienced her whole life of being
0:57.3	assigned male, but knowing she's female.
0:59.7	And what she meant by that is when she was born, the doctor held her up to her parents
1:04.7	and based on her genitalia said, it's a boy.
1:08.4	She always knew she wasn't a boy.
1:13.9	Many years passed and the feelings that she was feeling and holding all this in grew and grew and she knew she had to come out to her family.
1:18.6	And when she did, it didn't go over so well. Her parents said, absolutely not. You're not a girl.
1:24.0	This is not how we raised you. We don't know what you're thinking. Get out.
1:29.1	So Ann then found herself in the streets and in and out of homeless shelters, and it's here
1:33.6	where she started using drugs and alcohol to numb this pain she fell inside. She told me about
1:40.1	her journey of being in and out of hospitals and rehabs trying to get sober. And when she
1:45.2	did, the health care providers and doctors wouldn't use the correct female name or pronouns.
1:50.3	This caused her pain. You see, when I was studying to become a therapist, I wasn't taught how to
1:56.4	work with transgender patients. I had no idea this would be the patients I'd be working with.
	...

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