This post originally appeared on The 19th.
Lizette Trujillo’s son, Daniel, says he can’t remember his first doctor. Trujillo wonders if pain buried the memory for him — because she remembers.
She remembers when a quick appointment for an ear infection or back-to-school checkup doubled as a dance around Daniel’s pronouns, lest she confuse the doctors about her transgender son, or worse, risk being reported for child abuse for affirming him. She had heard horror stories and tried to avoid outing him.
“It was stressful to go to the doctor,” she recalled. “The trauma of being misgendered all the time, not getting to be your authentic self. He was very young; those memories tend to be a little bit fuzzier.”
So when Trujillo and Daniel met Dr. Andrew Cronyn, a trans-affirming pediatrician based in their home state of Arizona, their world changed.
“I think Daniel just got to go to the doctor and be himself, and was affirmed and respected,” Trujillo said. “A lot of that stress that I felt really melted away.”
“It was just easier because he had deals with other trans patients in the past, and was just like, ‘Oh, I know that, I can help you with that,’ Daniel, 14, said
Cronyn is no longer Daniel’s physician. At 54, after six years in practice, he sold his home and left his 250-patient practice in Tucson for a medical startup: Transhealth Northampton.
There, from a three-story brick building on a leafy street in Northampton, Massachusetts, a team of nearly all transgender, nonbinary and queer clinicians is setting a lot of firsts. Transhealth is the first rural transgender health clinic in the nation. It’s also one of the first health care organizations to be led entirely by transgender people to focus exclusively on transgender care.
