Vincent Cornelisse
Clinical posts from members and guests of the Australasian Society for HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine (ASHM) from various international medical and scientific conferences on HIV, AIDS, viral hepatitis, and sexual health.
Transgender is not a gender identity
Teddy Cook and Jeremy Wiggins gave a talk on the inclusion of transgender men in the HIV response, which provided much food for thought for healthcare practitioners and a call to action for health policy makers.
The presenters raised concerns that trans men generally report significant HIV risk, yet are overlooked in the HIV response. They highlighted some issues in data collection that may have resulted in trans people not being accurately represented in HIV data.
Particularly, they made the enlightening statement that "Transgender is not a gender identity". Trans men have very different experiences from trans women, and have different health requirements, including different sexual health requirements.
Also, health data collection does not accurately capture data on transgender people. For example, the Victorian Department of Health HIV notification form gives the gender options of "male", "female" and "transgender". By lumping trans men, trans women and genderqueer people into the same category, health data loses nuances that are important for informing health policy and health promotion.
Also, they highlighted some case studies illustrating how this simplistic gender categorisation has resulted in miscategorisation of trans people in HIV statistics. One case described a non-binary trans masculine person who was assigned female at birth who has sex with men, who was categorised as a heterosexual female on her HIV notification form. Obviously, in order to develop an appropriate public health response to address HIV risk in the transgender community, we need data that accurately reflects what is happening in the trans community.
The presenters suggested the following two-question gender classification in order to overcome some of these issues.
- Question 1: What is your gender
- Question 2: What gender were you assigned at birth
On a lighter note, Jeremy pointed out that a recent HIV testing campaign from Victoria did include a trans man. It's a fun campaign, so have a look at the video below: