President's Notes #13 from WPATH President Lin Fraser
Dear WPATH members,
With great joy and a certain degree of sadness in this first week of the New Year, I
am sending my last President’s Notes to you, the very special WPATH membership. I
remember I wrote to you last year and the year before at this same time, feeling
great hope for what we could accomplish to further our mission. I have not been
disappointed!
Being at the helm these past 2 1/2 years has been one of the best experiences of my
professional life. I am at that time of life where it is fitting, if one is fortunate enough,
to give back to one’s community and I have had the privilege of having you as my
community.
And what a time it has been! There has never been a better time to promote
evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy and respect in
transgender health.
Any organization is only as good as its people and we are so blessed. I have met so
many exceptional people, have had the opportunity to travel globally as your
representative, and have worked on fantastic programs with hardworking and
devoted people.
I look forward to seeing many of you in February at the 23rd Symposium in Bangkok
and meeting some I don’t yet know.
In these last notes, I want to say some words about the leadership that is leaving,
introduce you to the new board, and summarize some highlights of my term.
We will transition from the “Old" to the “New" Board in Bangkok, on February 17,
2014, to be exact.
The 2011- 2014 “OLD” Board is as follows:
Executive Committee
President - Lin Fraser EdD
President - Elect - Jamison Green PhD
Secretary- Treasurer- Gail Knudson MD
Past President - Walter Bockting PhD
Executive Director - Bean Robinson PhD
Directors
Becky Allison MD
Marsha Botzer MA
George Brown MD
Griet De Cuypere MD PhD
Randi Ettner PhD
Sam Winter PhD
Kevan Wylie MD
2014-2016 “NEW” Board
Executive Committee
President - Jamison Green PhD
President-Elect - Gail Knudson MD
Secretary-Treasurer - Vin Tangpricha MD PhD
Past- President - Lin Fraser EdD
Executive Director - Bean Robinson PhD
Directors
Tamara Adrian JD
Becky Allison MD
Griet De Cuypere MD PhD
Randi Ettner PhD
Dan Karasic MD
Kit Rachlin PhD
Sam Winter PhD
Although there is a lot of overlap, we are sadly saying goodbye to my most valued
colleague, mentor and predecessor, Past President Walter Bockting, and to Board
members Kevan Wylie, Marsha Botzer, and George Brown. We have found new jobs
within WPATH for some and hopefully the others won’t go far. It is hard to imagine
the WPATH Board without Walter. We plan to continue to partner with Kevan, who
is the esteemed President of the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS), with
George, who is in charge of training on trans issues in the VA amidst his many other
responsibilities, and with Walter and Marsha to mentor the Board leadership in
various capacities. Randi, Griet and Becky will remain on the board finishing their
terms in 2016 in Amsterdam.
We were honored to have many exceptional candidates for the new board, all of
whom could have served with distinction. We welcome new directors Dan Karasic,
Tamara Adrian, Kit Rachlin, and re-elected Sam Winter. We also welcome student
liaison Colt Meier, who although he will not be a voting member, will otherwise
participate and contribute to all board activities.
We also welcome Vin Tangpricha to the EC as Secretary-Treasurer and Jamison
Green and Gail Knudson to their new positions as President and President-Elect,
respectively.
I am also quite sure the transition to Jamison as President will be seamless. He has
been working very hard preparing for his Presidency. We have worked together and
now with Gail, so that our terms can build on each other, each having its own
imprimatur. Walter’s was SOC7and the consensus processes, mine is global growth
and international partnerships, Jamison will let you know about his, and Gail’s
candidate statement emphasized education and training. Rounding out the new EC
will be Vin, the new Secretary-Treasurer, who has been active in the leadership
already as Chair of Communications & Technology, Chair of the local organizing
committee in Atlanta and now Scientific Co-Chair with Stan Monstrey in Bangkok. I
can’t say enough good things about Gail and Jamison, who have worked night and
day for WPATH, and helped me more than I can ever express. I have a little saying
that has been repeated numerous times, it’s "Thanks, you two", and we laugh that
now it will be Jamison’s turn to say it.
Fortunately, we will have the same people in the office to anchor us and hold down
the fort. Under the leadership of our able Executive Director Dr. Bean Robinson, she
and her staff, Business and Events Manager Jeff Whitman and Executive
Administrator Andrea Martin, provide the continuity that keeps our organization in
tiptop shape from year to year. Bean holds and knows the history of the institution
and she has conscientiously and steadfastly kept us moored over her many years in
office. Her perspective has been especially invaluable during this time of explosive
growth. Andrea delights us all with her unremitting upbeat and kind disposition
under sometimes enormous pressure. And polymath hardworking Jeff knows
everything about the office and WPATH events, keeping us all in the loop with his
knowledge and marvelous sense of humor.
I want to reflect a bit about these past years.
Walter finished his Presidency with the launching of the SOC7 in Atlanta and the
first set of WPATH recommendations for diagnoses in ICD-11. We had set in place
under his leadership (with Co-Chairs Gail Knudson & Griet De Cuypere) a consensus
process that brings together global WPATH leaders working together using
technology, Google Sites and Skype, and in person meetings to develop
recommendations for DSM-5 and ICD-11. This model informs our work today as we
have expanded our work with ICD, including a grant-funded meeting in San
Francisco with 30 invited global leaders in February 2013. We plan to use this
model with our Global Education and Training Initiative (GEI), to be launched in
Bangkok.
We also received a generous grant from the Gender Identity Research and
Education Society (GIRES) in Atlanta to translate the SOC7 into multiple languages.
These translations have had an enormous impact on the visibility of WPATH and our
ability to increase access to care for trans people worldwide. To date, under the
leadership of Eli Coleman and the intrepid duo, Gail Knudson & Griet De Cuypere,
we have translated the SOC into Chinese, French and Russian, now available on the
WPATH website. Soon we will have the Spanish, German, Japanese, Norwegian and
Portuguese translations.
Soon after Atlanta, we decided that the focus of the next two years would fall under
the rubric TIPT, an acronym for the tipping point in global trans health. I have
written about this before, but I want to remind you again:
T-Training
I-International,
P-Partnering
T-Technology
We have done so many things and rather than belabor every point, I do want to
mention some highlights.
The Board met in Atlanta and then twice again for Strategic Planning, in Ghent
(thank you for hosting, Griet) and then in San Francisco just preceding the ICD
meeting. I must say we have a very good and hardworking board. The four strategic
directions for 2013-2016 are:
1: To be the worldwide authority on transsexual and transgender health
2: To advance knowledge through the facilitation, promotion, and dissemination
of research
3: To educate and train
4: To enhance WPATH's long-term success by emphasizing organizational
excellence and financial sustainability
We are in very good shape moving forward.
Our ICD consensus process has been very successful and we will be letting you know
more about it in an ICD Plenary partnering with the World Health Organization in
Bangkok.
We have partnered with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) on their
Blueprint for the Comprehensive Care of Trans Persons and their Communities in
Latin America and the Caribbean. Under the able leadership of Rafael Mazin MD, we
gave input in Washington DC and in Trinidad. We will let you know more about that
in Bangkok, too.
Soon after DC, we went to Cuba, invited by Mariela Castro Espín, Director of
CENESEX, where we opened the conference after Mariela spoke, with a plenary on
the SOC and WPATH in general. We invited her back to San Francisco, were able to
help her get a visa, and had a small joint WPATH/UCSF mini -conference with her
and her medical director, spearheaded by Dan Karasic.
We had the great opportunity to partner with Joanne Keatley and her team at the
Center of Excellence for Transgender Health for a highly successful National
Transgender Health Summit in May 2013.
We were invited to represent WPATH and speak on Psychotherapy in the SOC at the
21st Congress of the World Association for Sexual Health chaired by WPATH Board
Member Kevan Wylie, September 21-24, 2013 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
We partnered with Kirill Sabir, Head of the Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS) Trans Health Project and opened the 1st Trans Health (CIS) conference in
Moscow via Skype. This remarkable opportunity demonstrated the power of
technology as we move forward with our goal of educating internationally.
One strategic direction had to do with exploring the idea of chaptering. We were
invited to participate in discussions held in December 2013 in Ghent regarding the
launch of EPATH.
In terms of technology, we have a beautiful new website.
We did some fundraising using the crowd-funding platform, GoFundMe, for making
our EMR article, written by Maddie Deutsch, Jamison Green and JoAnne Keatley,
more accessible to the public. We met our goal in 3 days!
We will be distributing an SOC7 app in Bangkok, replete with our other languages.
We are very excited about this new tool.
We also have a presentation platform Scivee and our Student Initiative group,
chaired by new board member Kit Rachlin and Student Member Colt Meier, have
posted many presentations. You can also see some old President Notes, a special
report from Board member Randi Ettner, and a Global Education Initiative (GEI)
presentation about hormone treatment, delivered by Communication and
Technology Chair Vin Tangpricha. Take a look. http://www.scivee.tv/node/52946
This platform is for your use. Please take advantage of this member benefit.
We’ve used Skype in our work with ICD, the Russia conference opening and plan to
use it extensively in our GEI work. We have SOC7
https://www.facebook.com/groups/WPATH/ and Bangkok
https://www.facebook.com/WPATH2014 FB pages. I am always mightily impressed
by the encyclopedic knowledge of the membership as we share our professional
experience on the listserv.
Internationally, we have grown by leaps and bounds. See above and you will note
that the majority of our partners are global.
We have experience phenomenal growth, doubling our membership. I want to thank
our office staff, as this growth, while very exciting, has demanded much of them. If
you have a chance to thank them personally, I’m sure it would be most appreciated
and it is more than deserved. I have always admired their constant willingness and
good cheer as they labor under sometimes-enormous pressure.
Finally, the most exciting event is yet to come, but will soon be here in just a few
weeks, as I write. Our 23rd Biennial Symposium will take place at the Anantara
Riverside Hotel in Bangkok Thailand Feb 14-18, 2014. Thanks to Stan Monstrey,
who at the Oslo board meeting suggested that we have our conference in Bangkok,
and then to Dr. Preecha Tiewtranon, who offered to host the meeting, we are for the
first time going outside of Western Europe/North America (WENA) for our
Symposium. And your enthusiasm has exceeded our wildest expectations. I cannot
tell you how excited I am. The esteemed Scientific Co-Chairs, Stan Monstrey and Vin
Tangpricha have put together a fascinating interdisciplinary program that includes
papers from around the world. Sam Winter has put together a 4 session series,
sponsored by UNAIDS/UNDP entitled Trans people in Asia and the Pacific: Cultural,
legal and social environments, providing a unique opportunity for interaction
between WPATH members and trans health workers in Asia. The Surgical Summit,
co-chaired by Drs Stan & Preecha has generated immense excitement. The Gala on
the River Boat is sold out and the boat holds 400 people.
So this has been a very fulfilling and productive time. And I plan to remain very
much involved while Jamison, followed by Gail, are at the helm. I am Co-Chairing GEI
with Gail. This is our Global Education Initiative, and the product of and one of the
directions of our Strategic Plan, which is to educate and train. We have already
developed a daylong training for Kaiser Permanente, which was very successful, and
further trainings are planned. Our goal is to expand these trainings globally, utilizing
the expertise of our members and partners to help provide competent and
accessible care worldwide. We also have a credentialing committee working on a
much-needed WPATH certification. We will keep you posted
As Jamison starts his Presidency, we will have the benefit of a professional
Communications Director, Sue O’Sullivan.
In closing, I’d like to pass along something to Jamison, which was very helpful for
me. When I started this formidable, daunting and awesome task, I was well aware
that I was following in the footsteps of an incomparable President who had a long
history of successful leadership experience. I asked for advice from Walter Bockting,
with not just a little trepidation, knowing I could never lead as he had done. He said,
“Lin, just be yourself, and you will be fine.” I was heartened by that advice, more
than I can exactly convey and that is what I’d like to pass onto Jamison. As himself,
he will be an excellent leader. WPATH is in good hands.
With that image in mind, I just want to thank you all, from the bottom of my heart,
for doing the work you do. We all are lucky and privileged to have found work that
we love and that is meaningful.
And thank you for giving me this opportunity to serve.
With respect and much appreciation,
Lin
Lin Fraser EdD
WPATH President