When Healthcare Is Trauma-Informed, It Is Also Transgender-Affirming

Transgender people are often confronted with ignorance, transphobia, and stigmatization in healthcare by the very providers from whom they seek care. Discrimination is not a fear. It is an expectation. And those expectations are based on lived experience.

More than one-third of transgender patients have experienced healthcare discrimination. Nearly one in five have been persuaded by a professional to stop expressing their identity. Add in the fact that many states now allow providers to deny care on religious grounds, and you get a healthcare system that is anything but safe.

Trauma-informed care asks us to consider how systems harm people. It requires us to build services that do not retraumatize. And for transgender patients, that means naming the system’s role in the trauma.

Barriers to care are built into the medical and insurance system. They are rooted in a binary view of gender, in policies that require gatekeeping, in insurance plans that deny coverage or demand proof of identity, and in environments where even a simple visit requires educating the provider to avoid harm.

Even in systems where coverage exists, transgender patients are asked to jump through mental health evaluations just to receive medically necessary care. And those evaluations often reinforce the idea that being transgender is a pathology.

But being transgender is not a mental illness. The patient is not the problem. The problem is a system that demands proof, delay, and sacrifice just to access care that supports their well-being.

Informed consent is not just a paperwork form. It is a stance. A trauma-informed approach to transgender care means respecting the patient as the expert on themselves. It means putting the patient at the center of their care. Not as someone to be fixed or judged. But as someone deserving of support, safety, and self-determination.

At Indigo Path Collective, we know that trauma-informed care must also be system-informed. We are not here to gatekeep. We are here to advocate. And we believe that transgender-affirming care is not just a best practice. It is an ethical imperative.