'Insanity': Activists blame hospitals for not doing more to address their 'implicit biases' when treating transgender patients like this one

Sarah D | 6:00 PM on May 16, 2019

Who’s up for a thought exercise? Imagine, if you can, that you’re a hospital medical professional, and a man shows up complaining of abdominal pain. Would your first thought be, “Hey, I’d better give that man a pregnancy test”? If not, well, consider yourself highly problematic. Because the New England Journal of Medicine describes a case in which an obese man — classified in his medical records as male — arrived at a hospital with severe abdominal pains and a nurse, assuming that he was a man, didn’t think to test him for pregnancy. The individual, who was, in fact, transgender, ultimately delivered a stillborn baby.

And now, the experts have decided that hospitals need to be more woke before the same thing happens to other transgendered people:

Obese man came to hospital w/abdominal pain. His records list him as “male.” Turns out he was a pregnant transsexual. Some activists & health professionals are blaming hospital for not immediately testing for pregnancy. They want more bias training. https://t.co/dpaPwLDPBz

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) May 16, 2019

More from the AP:

Nic Rider, a transgender health specialist and psychologist at the University of Minnesota, said training isn’t enough.

“There are implicit biases that need to be addressed,” Rider said.

Health records may use male/female templates for gender but “it doesn’t mean that we just throw out critical thinking or think about how humans are diverse,” Rider said.

The case is horrifying but “not terribly surprising,” said Gillian Branstetter, a spokeswoman for an advocacy group, the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington.

Transgender people often run into problems getting gender-specific health care such as cervical cancer screening, birth control and prostate cancer screenings.

More needs to be done to improve medical awareness and recognition of diversity because “the consequences can be so dire, as this case shows,” Branstetter said.