Students and faculty gathered in the Center for Women’s Studies on Colgate University’s annual Trans* Day of Awareness with a discussion on access to healthcare for transgender individuals on Wednesday, Feb. 5. The featured panelists found that recent executive orders carried out by the Trump administration have led to many transgender and gender-expansive people feeling anxiety and unease.
Sophomore Julia Card saw this discussion as a meaningful way to uplift student voices.
“It is important to have conversations like these so that students feeling fear and uncertainty about having access to medical care with Trump’s policies feel supported and not isolated,” Card said. “I think that having the Colgate community present at this talk was an important component to helping students feel supported.”
Family physician Dr. Carolyn Wolf-Gould began the discussion on transgender health with a reference to her newly published book, “A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States.” Wolf-Gould has been practicing transgender medicine since 2007 and is the founder of the Bassett Healthcare Network’s Gender Wellness Center, a transgender healthcare practice in upstate New York.
Though medical transitions began at the start of the twentieth century, Wolf-Gould explained that the transgender identity long pre-dated any formal medical care. She spoke about the German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who started out as a radical activist for the homosexual community and other gender minorities who believed that same-sex desire was a natural congenital trait. Wolf-Gould explained that much of Hirschfeld’s research had didactic intentions.
“He felt certain that prejudice against all gender minorities would disappear if people understood that the behaviors had a congenital or biological basis,” Wolf-Gould said.
Eventually, Hirschfeld founded the Institution for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919, where he observed many gender reassignment surgeries and continued his advocacy work for accessible surgical transitions. This era of exploration ended when Hitler came to power, Wolf-Gould explained. A prominent scientist and trans advocate, Hirschfeld was singled out by the Third Reich’s violent antisemitism and transphobia, and was forced to flee to France. The Nazis destroyed his institute and its archives, and he died in exile a few years later. Wolf-Gould connected Hirschfeld’s life and fate to the contemporary political situation in the United States.
“This event reminds me intensely of the purges happening in research and clinical care over the last couple of weeks as a result of Trump’s executive orders. The [National Institutes of Health] is no longer allowed to use any words related to gender identity. The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has purged its website of information related to the collection of gender identity and youth,” Wolf-Gould said. “A constant theme has been the struggle to legitimize medical care and hence legitimize the lives of transgender people themselves.”
Wolf-Gould also spotlighted German-trained endocrinologist Dr. Harry Benjamin, who was the first American medical provider to bring gender-affirming care to the forefront.
“Benjamin believed that transexualism was not a mental illness, but a genuine psychological condition that caused profound suffering warranting care” Wolf-Gould said. “He advocated for hormone therapy in order to align the body with the mind.”
The conversation segued into underfunded clinics, federal and state legislature and the possibility of Colgate being unable to provide care to transgender and gender-expansive students. Panelist Karen Fuller, who has been working with parents and caregivers of transgender youth for two decades as a family peer advocate at the Q-Center in Syracuse, spoke on these issues.
“It’s very frustrating, even for us as an agency, it’s very scary right now. The Q-Center specifically — our whole boat is working with LGBTQ people and doing a lot of DEI. So we don’t know,” Fuller said.
The discussion touched on the executive order issued on Feb. 5, which effectively bans transgender women from participating in women’s sports. Wolf-Gould commented on the repercussions of this order on physical and mental health.
The conversation also celebrated how communities have helped each other navigate this systemic adversity.
Dr. Ellen Larson, Colgate’s Director of Student Health Services, affirmed that the University would continue to provide as much care and support to its transgender students as possible. Vice President and Dean of the College Paul McLoughlin expressed support for the Colgate staff striving to uphold this commitment.
“I think we hire really great people, first of all, at the collegiate level, who understand at the fundamental level that we’re here for students to support them and meet them where they are. And as it relates to trans students, there’s a lot we can do,” McLoughlin said.
Governor of New York Kathy Hochul recently stated her support for gender-affirming care, stating that per the Equal Rights Amendment it would be illegal for hospitals to close their clinics to ban care for children. Larsen and Fuller agreed this was a largely positive moment for the community. Wolf-Gould echoed their sentiments by sharing the intended role of her novel in this discourse.
“Every time there’s been progress, there’s been backlash,” Wolf-Gould said. “I hope that [‘A History of Transgender Medicine’] will contextualize what’s happening now as just another backlash.”
Wolf-Gould concluded the panel with an excerpt from her novel.
“We may stumble. We may experience setbacks. We may be beaten. We may succumb to infighting. We may be sued. We may be criminalized. We may be ridiculed. We may be ignored,” Wolf-Gould read. “But we will never cease to exist.”
