Blog

Exciting things in NYC’s public hospitals

tl;dr it’s great to see the NYC government create resources for LGBTQ people, and especially come through for the trans, gender non-conforming, and non-binary (TGNCNB) community.

 

I was really excited and honored this week to be invited to the unveiling of a new Pride Center (primary care for LGBTQ+ folks) at the H+H/Gouverneur facility! (This is part of NYC’s public hospital/clinic system, for those of you who don’t follow public hospitals!)

I’ve been working with a coalition of TGNCNB-led or serving organizations for nearly two years now (NYC Anti-Violence Project, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Translatinx Network, GMHC, Make the Road New York, not to mention the long-term vision and guidance of LaLa B Zannell and Cecilia Gentili) to make sure City government agencies respond to the needs of the TGNCNB community. We call ourselves the TGNCNB Solutions Coalition. (Note: I was late to this party; the organizations and people I mentioned had been working on this for years before I showed up. I’m the weird wonky lobbyist person who tries to get government to follow ideas that came out of the community.)

We advocated with a lot of folks in government to try and get people in the public hospital system to direct LGBTQ people broadly to affirming care, with a commitment to ensuring there’s excellent care for TGNCNB people. H+H responded by creating new staff, the LGBTQ Community Outreach Workers, and it was a delight to meet those workers, and thank folks in government who helped make this happen.

I was honored to be able to make a speech where I noted the responsibility of governments to provide LGBTQ people, and TGNCNB people (who are so frequently mistreated in health care settings, among other institutions), with RESOURCES, not just rights. It’s a delight to see this position bare fruit in NYC.

If you want to find affirming care in NYC, don’t hesitate to contact Tashan Lovemore (lovemoret [at] nychhc.org, pronouns he/him/his) and Wynn Heyward [heywardw1 [at] nychhc.org, pronouns they/they/theirs) for support!

And thanks to folks in government, Dr. Mitchell Katz at H+H, Deputy Mayor Herminia Palacio, and City Council Members, including Carlina Rivera and Mark Levine, among others, for advocating hard to fund LGBTQ Community Outreach Workers and provide other resources to support the community.

We helped release a policy brief

And we’re pushing it into policy.

Along with our friends at the Anti-Violence Project, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Audre Lorde Project, Make the Road New York, the New York City LGBT Center, GMHC, and TransLatina Network, Bowen Public Affairs Consulting helped in the writing and release of a policy brief highlighting the needs of the transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) community in New York City. Solutions Out of Struggle and Survival was released on November 20, 2017, and we’re working on making its recommendations reality through government relations work and political education in the TGNC community. New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said publicly that he would work with the coalition that put the brief together. This is an exciting release, and exciting work, and we’re honored to be a part of it.