Leonid Poretsky - Transgender Medicine : A Multidisciplinary Approach

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7680

This Humana Press imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Transgender medicine, like transgender rights, is a new frontier. Endocrinologists, however, have been inhabiting this frontier for decades because of the patients need for hormonal therapy. For this reason, I thought it would be appropriate to publish Transgender Medicine: A Multidisciplinary Approach in the Contemporary Endocrinology series.

Needless to say, comprehensive care of a transgender individual requires much more than hormonal therapyprimary care physicians, mental health professionals, pediatricians, plastic surgeons, specialists in reproductive health, and other medical specialists all have important roles to play. Further, because transgender patients needs often extend beyond medicine, social workers, legal professionals, and spiritual counselors also may have to be involved. Hence, the interdisciplinary nature of this book.

I am thankful to an outstanding group of accomplished experts passionately devoted to this field who enthusiastically contributed their time and effort to this volume. I realize that there is no publication that can match our transgender patients perseverance, determination, and courage in their pursuit of a fulfilling and happy life. I hope that this text will make a contribution to the development of the knowledge base sorely needed to help transgender individuals achieve their life goals.

Medical and social care of transgender persons require complicated, multidisciplinary efforts with complex strategies and many unknowns. The biology of gender identity, gender dysphoria, and gender incongruence is still incompletely understood. The best medical practice options are often based upon retrospective or empirical studies rather than upon controlled, randomized, double-blind trials common to most other areas of medicine.

Even hormone therapy for transgender individuals is commonly based upon the strategies used for estrogen replacement in menopausal women or testosterone in hypogonadal mentreatment modalities whose goals differ from those of gender affirming hormone therapy in transgender individuals. As a result, treatment may lack consistent standards of care required to ensure an acceptable transition in hormone levels using the best available therapeutic options. To make things even more complex, in addition to hormone therapy, transgender persons have a multitude of coincident needsmedical, surgical, educational, social, and legalall of which must be addressed.

In planning this volume, we attempted to address as many of these needs as possible. We have engaged a multidisciplinary group of experts and asked them to provide recommendations and advice based upon the best available evidence. Clearly, the important and compelling field of transgender medicine will continue to evolve and the next edition of this text (if and when it comes) may look very different. So, in the meantime, we hope that the reader will find this text a useful guide for safe and efficient care of transgender persons.

We are grateful to all contributors who embraced this project with immense enthusiasm and to our students who keep asking good questions and demanding evidence-based answers. Most importantly, we are indebted to those transgender persons from whom we continue to learn daily and with whom we are proud to share their accomplishments.