I add my voice to the growing number of health care professionals and medical societies condemning the newest human rights violation by the Trump administration against our transgender community. The urgency of this issue is paramount! To deny health care rights during a global pandemic is both inhumane and absurd. Our trans patients and colleagues are already vulnerable due to the health disparities inherent in our system and biases from healthcare practitioners. Not only are out trans patients affected but all patients who fall under any part of our QUEER community in the past, present or future are at risk, making it even more difficult to be open and honest wit our health care providers.

Gender based and transphobic violence includes racism, murder and hate crime. It disproportionately affects black trans lives, especially black trans women. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising and Covid19 the reversal of transgender health protections puts an immediate threat to black trans patients, and all trans BIPOC patients who identify as gender neutral or non-binary.

This recent action should be met with a call to arms from all medical professionals, including attending physicians, resident, medical students, nurses, APPs and staff. We must to do our best to provide trauma-based compassionate medicine and NEVER deny care for transgender patients nor any LGBTQ patients. The personal views of providers in any setting (outpatient, clinic, hospital or otherwise) must not be allowed to interfere with the right to health care. The recent COVID pop-up hospital in a Brooklyn park that denied transgender and LGBT care is an atrocious example of what the Trump administration is suggesting here.

There is a dearth of education for healthcare professionals from the earliest academic levels. Health disparities, intersectional oppression, and implicit biases of language, systems and structures have to be called out and addressed to stop this cycle of ignorance. Silence is clearly violence, and we cannot in good faith stay silent and allow conservative politicians to sacrifice health protection in the names of transphobia and racism – not now or ever again.

• Kaiser Kabir OMS4 Lincoln Memorial University
• Masina Wright, DO PGY1 University of New Mexico Hospital, Internal Medicine