Gender Discrimination In Health Care

Gender is how humans differentiate other humans from each other; boys love playing with toy cars, girls love the color pink and playing with dolls. These stereotypes along with many, many more, define gender; but what happens when a little boy likes playing with dolls more than his toy cars, and as he gets older, realizes that he identifies more with being a girl? Growing up being told you should act a certain way and like certain things that correlate with your assigned gender can be very confusing when you do not feel like you are that gender on the inside. That internal conflict is hard enough to deal with, but pilling on the judgment from parents, family members, friends, and even strangers, makes it near impossible to cope with. Because …show more content…
Healthcare discrimination is actually very prominent in the military itself, but it is also common in everyday life. ‘Health’ is a very holistic thing and it includes not only physical illness or impairment, but emotional and mental health as well. So, when using the term ‘health’ in conversation with transgender people, it is not just talking about the idea that these people need hormones or sex change surgeries, they are human too and could need therapy or some kind of prescription drugs for various mental illnesses. These issues related to healthcare for transgender people are not “adequately addressed by professionals” (3512) because they are not educated on how to care for these people, or do not care to learn. “It is difficult for a transgender person to get a good picture of what sexual health can be”, the reason being that schools teach sex education towards non-transgender people. This can be very difficult for the transgender groups because they will not know how their body works and this can also lead them to feel isolated and alone. The discrimination does not stop at physical things; “some informants have been denied counselling support by professionals with the rationale that the informants’ way of living their life was against the professional’s moral values” (3516). Healthcare encompasses a variety of things, and within everything that …show more content…
These things can stretch as far as pay equality, keeping a current job, or even getting hired in the first place. On the topic, Erin, a transgender female, says that “I’m scared that if I lose my job it’s going to be hard for me to be hired on somewhere else” (90). This is a huge concern; these people live in a constant fear of discrimination due to their gender identity. Not only does this affect their careers but it even affects their personal lives, and their relationships suffer “due to ongoing workplace harassment and pressures” (124). When looking into the lives of transgender people, you only look as far as you want to see, and no one really goes as far as to even think about their social lives. This proves that as a society, we tend to forget that transgender people are human too, which is where most discrimination roots