To protect gender-affirming care, we must learn from trans history
Harvard Public Health magazine
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We have some news! We’re proud to share that our Fall 2022 issue on structural racism received a CASE Circle of Excellence?Silver Award for News/Feature (Series or Collection). If you haven’t read it yet, we encourage you to check out an issue the judges lauded for its “great effect.”
The culture war on gender-affirming care has happened before
Pride Month’s celebrations and parades have taken place against a grim backdrop of 491 new anti-LGBTQ bills introduced by state legislatures since the start of 2023. Many of the bills have limited access to gender-affirming care—transition surgery or hormone therapy—for minors. Our contributor Alejandra Caraballo reminds us that today’s culture war over transgender kids echoes backlashes against gender-affirming care in 1930s Germany and the United States during the Reagan era. The Nazi party targeted German physician Magnus Hirschfeld—who led the first efforts to study and treat gender dysphoria—looting his research institute and burning 20,000 books from its library in an effort to shut down his work. Caraballo writes that the Nazi period is no anomaly and “has clear parallels to today’s efforts to demonize and dehumanize the LGBTQ+ community and deny the very existence of trans people.”
More from HPH
A nationwide study found the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has so far led to 25,000 fewer abortions in the months following. Study co-chair Ushma Upadhyay spoke with our contributor Amanda Becker on how the data was collected and what it says about abortion access one year later.
Meanwhile, a new vision to counter the anti-abortion movement’s effort to create “complete state control over reproductive choice and health” comes from Kelly Baden and Isabel Guarnieri of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy nonprofit dedicated to advancing sexual and reproductive rights.
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Dispatch from Aspen Ideas: Health
Jina Moore, our new managing editor, attended Aspen Ideas: Health last week. She says she heard a slew of good ideas during the four-day event, but three stood out:?
To increase equity, change how doctors learn to see
Darker skin color appears in fewer than five percent of images in medical textbooks. No wonder nearly 50 percent of dermatologists say they’re unprepared to treat people with darker skin. Chidiebere Ibe, a medical student and illustrator, is working together with Johnson and Johnson?to change all that by building?the world’s largest library of BIPOC medical illustrations.?
Composting people
Katrina Spade is a city person, an environmentalist, and mortal. The result??She invented “natural organic reduction”—that is, human composting. For $7,000, her company?Recompose?buries a newly deceased person in a “composting vessel,” with a mix of wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Twelve weeks later, the body has become nutritious topsoil that loved ones can spread as they would cremated ashes.?A “green” death uses one-eighth the energy of cremation or burial and keeps one metric ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Can love end our “epidemic of isolation?”
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy thinks so. As he told the crowd in Aspen, “The love that you convey to somebody else in a moment of kindness, in a generous moment—by showing up when there’s a friend who’s in need, by just listening when someone in the family is in crisis—that love is powerful, that love is healing. There is no force I know, no medicine that I’ve written a prescription for, that is more powerful when it comes to healing than the force of love.”
What we’re reading this week
We’re taking a break next week. We’ll be back in your inbox July 13!
—Christine