we're featuring three experts in LGBTQIA+ health. As Texas and other states seek to limit access to gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, it’s important to contextualize and understand the importance of these services from the professionals who provide them. 

We hope the sources this week will expand your newsroom’s coverage on the current legal and medical battles over LGBTQIA+ rights.

Arjee Restar is a social epidemiologist and health equity advocate, and an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health. Her research examines the behavior, social and structural determinants of health, particularly in transgender and nonbinary communities.

Restar works to expand the field of transgender of health, building research environments that produce scholarship on the health prirotities of transgender and nonbinary individuals. Along with her research on gender-inclusive healthcare in the U.S., she has contributed to and led studies on the lived experiences of HIV-positive gay and bisexual men in the Philippines. Her work includes advocating for institutional policies and practices that dismantle systems of oppression, inequality and inequity.

Lourdes Dolores Follins is a Black, queer psychotherapist, author, and public speaker on the mental health and well-being of queer, trans and intersex people of color (QTIPOC). She has been a licensed clinical social worker for nearly 30 years, and was a professor at the City University of New York and a mental health researcher. 
 
Through her company, Meliora Consulting, Follins works with QTIPOC recovering from intersectional oppression and complex trauma. In addition, she is a Yorùbá-Lukumí priest of Ogun and applies West African and Afro-Latino spiritual traditions in her psychotherapy practice. In the past decade, much of her scholarship, research and writing has focused on health equity in Black LGBTQ communities.

Dr. Oni Blackstock is the founder and executive director of Health Justice, a health equity consultancy firm that works with health-related organizations on centering anti-racism in medical work. She is a primary care and HIV physician and serves as an attending physician at Harlem Hospital Center in New York.
 
She previously served as assistant commissioner at the New York City Health Department, where she led the city’s response to the HIV epidemic. Prior to that, she was an assistant professor of medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, where she conducted research to develop and test interventions to promote HIV prevention and treatment. 

Other sources of interest this week.

You should be talking to an endocrinologist who serves trans youth in Texas. 
 
Dr. Ximena Lopez is a pediatric endocrinologist who sees patients at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. She is an associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. As medical director and founder of the GENder Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support (GENECIS) program at Children’s Medical Center, her primary focus is the care of youth with gender dysphoria. The GENECIS program provides comprehensive mental and endocrine care for youth with gender dysphoria.

Sources of the Week on the news

Read:

• Congratulations to Mae Ngai for winning the Bancroft Prize for her book The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics.
• In The Atlantic, Tracy Hadden Loh wrote about the need for downtown areas to adapt to the era of hybrid work. 
• The State interviewed Sung Won Sohn about unemployment and inflation worries in California.
• Felicia Pride was featured in Forbes for her impact as a screenwriter in the television industry.
• Shout out to Dolores Albarracín who was elected as a fellow with the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Watch:

• On NBC Sports, Jim Trotter shared his reaction to the Seattle Seahawks trade with the Broncos.

Listen:

• On Life Kit, Sheena Iyengar tells us how to be less indecisive about everyday decisions.