Happy #LGBTQSTEMDay ! Friendly reminder to graduate school programs that if your health insurance doesn’t cover trans-related health care, your program is NOT inclusive … 1/n

In my search for a graduate program (neuroscience), I spent HOURS reading through each schools’ health insurance statements of coverage… 2/n

Some schools that claim on their main websites to have ‘trans-inclusive healthcare’ actually don’t when you read the fine print, instead they … 3/n

leave the coverage ambiguous and students negotiate directly with the doctors and insurance company to cover anything (I’ve done this and it doesn’t work in your favor often)…4/n

But that’s not the norm. The norm is zero coverage. More than 80% of programs cover absolutely nothing. Think about that in the context of ‘living wage’ grad stipends….5/n

For the schools that do include trans health care, most only cover HRT but not other common critical care (e.g. surgery). Perhaps not surprisingly… 6/n

The majority of programs with coverage are elite private institutions, but there are a few public ones that do too (University of Washington, UC schools)…7/n

Trans people face so many other barriers in accessing education that being limited to EXTREMELY competitive institutions primarily on the coasts is frustrating…8/n

I only applied to schools with trans health care coverage, but made an exception for one program because of an incredible scientist I would love to work with one day… 9/n

But after visiting and looking at cost of living/stipend compared to potential health care costs, it did not matter how much I liked the program/research, it was unaffordable…10/n

ADDING HEALTH CARE COVERAGE is an ACTIONABLE, concrete step that can be taken at hundreds of institutions … 11/11