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Lurie LGBT center launching Gender Identity Clinic

by Kate Sosin

Dr. Rob Garofalo (left) and Dr. Travis Gayles in clinic. Photo credit Terry Janice.

Go to Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, and you’ll find one of the most HIV-impacted communities in the city. But look for free HIV testing services, and you might come up short. The neighborhood, which is home to myriad social service providers, has few HIV testing sites. Zach Stafford, of the Gender, Sexuality and HIV Prevention Center based out of Lurie Children’s Hospital, comes up with two, and one is his own. “Uptown has been missed, which is really interesting,” Stafford says.

Stafford is a behavioral research associate at the Center, which has just moved to Uptown, bringing with it testing services, transgender support and cutting edge LGBT medical research. With the move now behind it, the Center is gearing up a laundry list of new plans, including the establishment of one the first clinics for transgender children in the country.

The move to Uptown

The Center has three primary functions: research, services and advocacy. Over the past two years, the ways its carries out that mission has consistently grown. When Lurie Children’s Hospital recently vacated Lincoln Park for its new downtown home, the Center was faced with some big questions. Dr. Rob Garofalo, director of the Center, knew that a center serving LGBT and HIV-positive people would have the most impact in a neighborhood outside of the downtown area. Others at Lurie agreed that the Center should find a community-based site, rather than following the hospital.

Dr. Travis Gayles, research fellow and clinical instructor, said the goal was keep the Center close to the people it served, where clients could feel comfortable. “Anytime you are doing community-based participatory research… you want to be in the community,” Gayles said. “It’s great to do research, but we really want to do research that means something to the people we’re discussing.” 

Part of what drove that decision was also proximity to other LGBT groups. “When you are in the community and you have footprint in the community, it allows for that first step in terms of making partnerships with different organizations,” said Gayles. “I think it gives you a lot more credibility when you are in the community, as opposed to saying, ‘we’re going to stay in the ivory tower and come out and do it and run back.’” But the Center also wanted to avoid replicating services. Uptown, which has some of the highest HIV numbers in the city but few LGBT-specific services, became the obvious choice. “There really isn’t another social service agency in the vicinity that targets the population that we really want to target,” Garofalo said.

The Center’s new home at 4711 N. Broadway puts it close to two Red Line stops. And it is close enough to both Lakeview and Edgewater to allow the Center easy collaboration with groups based in both neighborhoods.

New Gender Identity Center

Furthering the expansion of the Center, is the agency’s plans to launch a Gender Identity Clinic. The move fills a major gap in gender-affirming care in Chicago. The clinic, which is up and running but has yet to officially launch, is the first of its kind in the city and one of few resources for gender-variant kids younger than 13. Through the clinic, children dealing with gender identity issues will have access to everything from endocrinology to psychology. “As a unit, the family is not always ready to embrace terms like ‘LGBT’ or ‘transgender,’” said Dr. Rob Garofalo, director of the Center. “I think coming to Lurie allows people to come to a place where services are hopefully increasingly culturally competent, without threatening the developmental trajectory that these families have to go through.”

Garofalo created the clinic out of a patchwork of specialists already working within Lurie, a move that both has both staffed the clinic and furthered understanding about transgender lives within Lurie, he said. The Center will also employ a psychologist and a social worker. In past years, Chicago families with transgender kids often found medical and mental health services piecemeal. While many of the city’s LGBT organizations offer youth services, most of those services are designed for kids ages 13 and older. Some families flew to Boston Children’s Hospital or Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which both have gender clinics for children. But for families without the time or means to travel, finding specialists that understood gender issues and kids presented a serious challenge.

Resources for transgender children in Chicago are scarce, something that Carr learned early on after her child shared that she felt like a girl. Carr approached both Center on Halsted and Howard Brown Health Center looking for resources, but she found that neither agency served young children. The clinic is already seeing 30 families from throughout the Midwest, Garofalo said. It will officially launch later this year. The new clinic was made possible due to a significant donation from the Tawani Foundation and money that Lurie itself committed to clinic.

For a full list of services offered at the Center, check out: www.chicagochildrensresearch.org/gender.

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