Story by SHELBY SMALL, Solutions News Bureau
Three years ago, when Angela Wagner entered the nursing program at Oakland University, she knew one thing; she wanted to help others, specifically, members of the LGBTQ community. Her passion for equality in health care led her to join the LGBTQ+ Mentorship Program through the National Student Nurses Association, which she has been a part of since this past summer. During her time in the mentorship program, and her experience in nursing school, Wagner has witnessed inequalities in healthcare firsthand.
Q: What is a specific challenge you faced during your nursing career?
A: I had patients who were gender diverse, not cis-gender women giving birth, so we call them birthers instead of mothers. I have had doctors or other nurses who incorrectly refer to these patients as the mother, instead of as the person giving birth, and you can tell that it impacts their birth experience. I think that it adds additional stress to them during that experience and adds to their dysphoria.
That’s why I am personally interested in LGBT issues in nursing, as it relates to OB, labor, and delivery. Seeing patients who are trying to go through this very normal human process of giving birth and are facing all these additional barriers to proper care because of their gender identity. Even with sexual orientation, when they (healthcare professionals) are asking for the father and there are two gay women.
“It’s all about advocacy for me. About how I can advocate for my patients and LGBT people in general of course, but specifically in the field of nursing.”
Angela Wagner
Q: In your opinion, how can the healthcare community be more accommodating to gender-diverse individuals?
A: First of all, it (gender identity) should be in their initial charts, it should be in their assessments. Practitioners need to be more intentional about checking that before they enter that space because if practitioners are going into the room assuming that the patient is a woman, that may be true for most patients, but it can seriously negatively impact the patients that are not cisgender. I have not seen pronouns in charts, but I have seen gender identity. People are not marked as male or female are marked as other or transsex, but even the language of referring to someone’s gender as other I find to be a little dehumanizing.
Q: Who do you turn to when you see this issue in your work?
A: I joined the LGBTQ+ Mentorship Program through the National Student Nurses Association. I was assigned a mentor that I worked with to look at research relating to LGBTQ+ health outcomes.
Q: How has your mentorship program helped you learn how to address this issue?
A: It has completely empowered me to become an advocate for my patients, and to feel as though it is necessary and important, and it is not inconveniencing anybody because it is something that practitioners should be aware of and respect. I think has brought me more of a perspective of how all those different intervening marginalized identities can influence my patients and the way that I care for them.
Q: Do you feel as if the mentorship program takes intersectionality into consideration?
A: I feel as if it is one of the things that they are trying to incorporate into the program, especially in discussions of race, physical and mental disabilities. A lot of the articles we study are addressing Black and transgender women. If we look at it from the perspective that, yes, this is bad for all transgender people, but when you add in the additional layer of being a racial minority, of being Black or indigenous, and being transgender, and then seeing how the rates of violence completely skyrocket compared to their white counterparts it forces you to be aware of the way that those identities intersect.
Q: How does this mentorship further your readiness to enter the field of nursing?
A: It’s all about advocacy for me. About how I can advocate for my patients and LGBT people in general of course, but specifically in the field of nursing. I also think that being able to have a space within the field of nursing with other LGBT people and people who prioritize the care of that population, it’s really furthered my passion for nursing in general, because I think that LGBT issues can really be pushed to the backburner in LGBT curriculums.
Q: Do you feel like there is something else that the program could do to be more beneficial for students?
A: This program focuses more on the process of how research happens and how we go about learning from research, but it does not necessarily address the ways in which the research is specifically implemented into the care that we are providing to individual patients. It focuses more on broadening the information that we have and is less patient-focused.
Q: In your opinion, do you think that focusing on different identities should be a larger part of the nursing curriculum?
A: Absolutely, I feel like LGBTQ issues in nursing are only addressed in the context of HIV and assessing someone’s sex. It really is the bare minimum. For me it’s just that we need to do more, we always need to be doing more. We need to be pushing for more people to join this program, and for broader opportunities for expanding nursing programs to be including more LGBTQ content. We always need to be doing more.
This story was produced in collaboration with the New York & Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations and universities dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about successful responses to social problems. The group is supported by the Solutions Journalism Network.
