Throughout the past year, PNWU Student Doctor Oak Sonfist has served as an Academic Medicine Writing Fellow for Building the Next Generation of Academic Physicians (BNGAP), an organization which aims to help diverse medical students and residents embark upon an academic medicine career.

As a member of the fellowship’s inaugural class, Student Dr. Sonfist spent the year working with mentors and fellows across the country to develop the reference base and content for novel educational modules focusing on topics that are often left out of medical school curricula.

PNWU’s Office of Scholarly Activity (OSA) recently connected with Student Dr. Sonfist to discuss their experience.

Why were you interested in pursuing this fellowship?

This opportunity was huge. As a transgender medical student, I wanted to be able to contribute on a nation-wide level to improving the health outcomes of my beloved transgender community.

What did you gain from the experience?

Through the fellowship, I was able to work with a dedicated team, including several mentors and other members of the Medical Student Pride Alliance (MSPA) who belong to the LGBTQ+ community.

Working with Student Drs. Joseph Rojo and Jessica Jordan showed me how powerful collaboration can be as we each brought our own strengths to the team. Under the guidance of Dr. Rosa Lee and Dr. Amber Stroupe, we created an educational module titled, “Options in Transgender and Gender-Diverse Reproductive Healthcare: An Interactive Virtual Workshop.” This module will hopefully serve as a foundation to increase the capacity of all medical students in the United States to better serve the unique healthcare needs of the transgender/gender-diverse community.

What exactly does the module entail?

I worked with two other fellows to develop an educational module about the unique healthcare needs of transgender/gender-diverse people, a topic that is missing in most curricula.

We delivered the module in May and collected pre- and post-surveys to assess the module’s efficacy. We did a live presentation of the module at the BNGAP Medical Education Conference on April 10 and are submitting the module to be considered for publication on MedEdPORTAL.

The module will hopefully provide an entry level educational resource that all medical schools can implement to ensure their students will provide transgender/gender-diverse informed care.

How did you find out about this opportunity?

When I was the president of PNWU’s Chapter of the MSPA, I received email updates from the national leadership team to forward to our club chapter. One of the emails announced that MSPA had partnered with BNGAP and had an opportunity for three members of MSPA to be Academic Medicine Writing Fellows.

With my strong advocacy background and interest for increasing scientific literature supporting the transgender/gender-diverse population, I thought that would be a great opportunity, so I applied and was selected I was to be a BNGAP fellow.

BNGAP offers several of these kinds of fellowships and advertises them through club networks. I anticipate that an announcement for this fellowship will be sent out mid-June and will be open for a few weeks.

Which parts of this fellowship/process surprised you the most? What was more challenging than you anticipated? What was easier?

The IRB Process is LONG. We started the IRB process in November of 2020 and finally received full-board approval in May of 2021.

Meeting deadlines is hard with three medical students at different levels of their training and in different time zones, but it is not impossible. I found working over emails and Zoom to actually be totally fine.

And surprisingly, I found friendships with my co-authors that I know will last a lifetime.

What comes next for you? Will you be continuing with this project?

We have submitted our learning module to MedEdPORTAL to be considered for publication. At this time, we are interested in presenting it again to collect more learning data.

This was actually one of two projects I had been working on over the last year specifically regarding the transgender community. The other project was a scoping review investigating infertility among people using gender-affirming testosterone. I presented this at the PNWU Research Symposium as a poster. My team was hoping to pursue publication, but another team of investigators beat us to it!

I am interested in continuing to find topics that have not yet been addressed by the scientific community, that direly need to be, highlighting the medical inequalities members of the LGBTQ+ community face. I have been considering a creating a project on how transgender/gender-diverse individuals cannot access health care and how they precariously become autodidacts by necessity. I am excited to see what opportunities present themselves to me and what my research future will hold.

Is there anything else you would you like to share?

This is an excerpt I wrote from the module that I would like to share with OSA and the PNWU community:

“According to the Health Care Quality Index 2020 from the Human Rights Campaign:

70% of transgender or gender non-conforming patients surveyed have experienced some type of discrimination in healthcare.
73% of transgender respondents reported that they believed they would be treated differently by medical personnel because of their LGBTQ status.
52% of transgender respondents reported that they believed they would be refused medical services because of their LGBTQ status.

These statistics show that the MAJORITY of transgender and gender-diverse (non-binary included) patients have distrust in the medical community. Unfortunately, this distrust is well founded because the of transgender and gender-diverse population is not a protected class across the United States of America. And legal protections vary by state. In some states it is legal to discriminate intentionally against of transgender and gender-diverse patients, refusing service. And due to lack of education, even in states that protect the rights of transgender and gender-diverse patients, inherent biases and discrimination are severely prevalent.”

To any skeptics who have doubts regarding the legitimacy of the transgender community, I would like to remind you that transgender and gender-diverse people are humans, just like you. And if you take a moment to get to know us, I bet you may even like us.

I will leave this now with a quote from the song “Change Your Mind” from the TV show “Steven Universe”:

“I don't need you to respect me, I respect me
I don't need you to love me, I love me
But I want you to know you could know me
If you change your mind….
…Change your mind”

Oak Sonfist

Third-Year Osteopathic Medical Student (OMS III)

Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences

You Could Know Me: PNWU Student Doctor Oak Sonfist Helps to Address Medical Inequalities Facing LGBTQ+ Community