Her company decided to open in-person clinics and hire more physicians licensed in Florida in order to continue to provide care to patients who have already enrolled, even though that represents a major change to the company’s business model. “For trans adults, it’s devastating,” said Kate Steinle, Chief Clinical Officer at FOLX Health, which provides gender-affirming care to trans adults through telemedicine. Read on to learn more about the impacts of the anti-trans legislation, and what FOLX Health is doing to help. We are mobilizing all the resources we can to be able to serve LGBTQI+ people in Florida. We are hearing from our members every day about how scared they are about these new laws. Our results indicate need for better data collection, improved coursework/training on inclusion and greater content on nutrition/healthcare needs for LGBTQ-identifying patients and clients.This Pride month nearly 100,000 trans adults in Florida are facing new barriers to care, and many have already lost access. Survey data indicated significant differences between heterosexual and non-heterosexual respondents to a number of questions including homosexuality in society, awareness of LGBTQ community experiences, importance of academic content/training on nutrition assessment/care of LGBTQ-identified folx and responsibility for advocacy for LGBTQ-identifying patients/clients. Supporters of success included people/groups with supportive characteristics, therapists/mental health professionals, and passion for the field. Qualitative analyses identified themes of overt and covert “underminers” of success including heteronormative assumptions/talk, misgendering, microaggressions, self-editing and closeting, and identified a lack of adequate LGBTQ-related healthcare content in academics/training. National convenience and snowball sampling strategies generated n=131 students, interns and professionals of ACEND-accredited programs for our survey and n=10 for our semi-structured interviews. To explore the experiences of LGBTQ-identifying dietetics students, interns and practitioners we conducted a mixed-methods study grounded in Feminist Standpoint theory.

This holds for LGBTQ-identified individuals studying and practicing in healthcare professions but to date there have been no studies of the dietetics profession. Research suggests that LGBTQ-identifying folx, experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, stigmatization, discrimination and isolation and many have unmet healthcare needs. It is unknown how many dietetics students, interns, or practitioners identify as LGBTQ as these data are not collected by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics nor its “sister” organizations. Individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) currently comprise over five percent of the population in America.

Lgbtq folx