In recent years, more and more people have grown comfortable with expressing their identities and coming out as transgender. Subsequently, that’s more and more people who will be seeking medical assistance. Many transgender individuals who have sought out medical aid have not been able to receive the amount of help they require, and this is largely due to lack of experience and training in the health care industry.
 
Medical trainees need to be provided with resources and the knowledge to care for their transgender patients just as effectively as their cisgender patients. With untrained personnel, the risk of being treated incorrectly and suffering because of it is a real and scary one. This may also induce a rise in the mortality rate, as for some transgender people, transitioning and getting what they need can be considered a matter of life and death. There are some who would prefer to die over living out their lives in a body they do not consider their own.
 
Help advocate for better medical education regarding transgender people. As suggested in a report written by Deborah McPhail et al. with PMC Labs, educators in the medical field should adhere to a small curriculum that gives students “a very basic overview on what “transgender” means and the health issues of trans people … training in language and proper pronoun usage for interactions with patients…” and “basic training in the diagnosing of gender dysphoria”, to name a handful. The full list may be viewed at the end of this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5344057/
 
This would benefit not only transgender patients, but also the LGBTQ+ community as a whole by encouraging others to accept and help them when they reach out.