"A World in Transition"
Surgeon Jess Ting, MD, surgical director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who performed more than 100 gender reassignment surgeries during the past year, can tell you exactly how many hours of training he received in transgender medicine during his general surgical training in the 1990s: Zero. “I don’t think I heard the word transgender once,” said Hansel Arroyo, MD, psychiatry director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, associate professor, psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who runs the Mount Sinai fellowship psychiatric program, says transgender people often encounter obstacles when looking for mental health care. Some providers say outright that they’re unwilling or unable to treat transgender patients; others present more subtle barriers, such as office personnel who won’t call these patients by their preferred name or pronoun. “We don’t need many reasons to avoid seeing the doctor,” Dr. Arroyo says. “So those people don’t go in, and they live with their issues, which can put lives at risk.” The first surgical fellow, Bella Avanessian,MD, says that training under Dr. Ting “provides immersion in a field that is hard to study in any other way.”
- Jess Ting, MD, Surgical Director, Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, Assistant Professor, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
- Hansel Arroyo, MD, Psychiatry Director, Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, Associate Professor, Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
- Bella Avanessian, MD, Surgery Fellow, Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery
