Queer Lens: Nicole Macri on Transgender Healthcare — 2018
Channel: SeattleLGBTQ
Date: 08/11/2018

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:: TRANSCRIPT :: 

My name is Nicole Macri and I use she/her pronouns and I’m the state representative from the 43rd legislative district in Seattle, Washington.  

I think the state of transgender healthcare in Seattle is much improved from where it has been but with a lot more work to do.  

We’ve done a lot of work to expand access to trans-specific healthcare by making state policy for trans health equity, but we still struggle in a number of areas including cultural competency among providers, making sure that there’s access in all areas of the Seattle region, and ensuring that everyone can get the coverage they need so they can afford the healthcare that they need and deserve.

We spent a lot of time in the last couple of years really on the defense from attacks on the Affordable Care Act that have disproportionately negative impacts on folks with the greatest barriers to accessing healthcare, and transgender people certainly fall within that category. 

We enacted policies to protect the preventative care services that are currently in the Affordable Care Act to ensure that those services are always protected here in Washington state regardless of what happens at the national level.

The burden seems to always be put on transgender people to educate cisgender people about their experience, and that can be not only tiring but really demoralizing. 

I had one coworker who came to me and said he’d been denied his coverage of his hormones and had been paying out of pocket for years that he had worked at the organization and just thought that was just how it was — that the care that he needed was not covered. 

People who are trans or gender-nonconforming often have higher rates of mental health conditions, and that is not necessarily because people who are trans have a higher propensity towards mental illness: it’s that society has so marginalized their identity that they often experience deep trauma to just moving through the world.  

We have great specialty providers for young people, we have great providers through Children’s Hospital and other institutions, but the challenge is there’s just not enough so we have a long ways to go in ensuring that folks can get mental health services whether it be counseling or more serious in-patient care, and I’m hoping in the 2019 session that the legislature will make mental healthcare— particularly mental healthcare in home communities— a top priority.

I’m really grateful for the providers who have led the way on that and to transgender individuals who have really reached out to some of our higher-ed institutions to help ensure that we continue to do appropriate training for folks because while we might provide coverage for people, if people do not feel welcomed in the healthcare settings that we have, they won’t seek that healthcare, and that’s not good for any of us.

We want to pat ourselves on the back for how much more progressive we are here compared to some other parts of the country, and that we should really continue to push ourselves because we have a long ways to go, still.