11/21/2025
"Ours is the future, you know? Our time as transgender people is coming. We are the next generation." - Sylvia Rivera, 1996
As hateful transphobic rhetoric continues to get louder and louder across this country, we want to take time to center, honor, and celebrate the glorious lives of transgender and gender diverse people past, present, and future.
We are a q***r owned clinic with a gender diverse team, and creating an environment that provides high-quality q***r and trans-inclusive care is something we value and prioritize!
This is not only rooted in our clinical practices - it's rooted in our medicine.
As clinicians, we are taught to “treat what we see.” And when we see our patients FULLY - like, really see them - what we will see will be more complex than a binary paradigm.
Chinese medical thinking acknowledges that everything contains both yin and yang in varying degrees. Yin-yang theory asserts that all phenomena in the Universe (humans included, we are part of the Universe too!) undergo constant change and transformation.
All things express expansiveness through the opposition, interdependence, interconsumption, and intertransformation. Yin and yang are infinitely divisible. Additionally, Chinese medicine utilizes multiple paradigms simultaneously and interchangeably in patient assessment, diagnosis, and treatment.
Put simply: binary thinking is outside the realm of Chinese medical thought. There is not one, or the other. There is always everything in all things, and everything is changing all the time.
As practitioners, we have the opportunity to hold space and provide care within a theoretical framework that affirms constant states of change and transformation, variation in s*x and gender, and the absolute importance of individual evolution and expression of one's true nature.
We get to support our patients in nourishing life - their life! - in all its richness and diversity.
Inviting space for fluidity in expression is important for ALL patients, not just those who self-identify as transgender or other gender diverse identities.
As Kim's mentor, Dr. Catherine Lumenello, shared with her, “We have to allow our clients to be more fluid than even they might recognize in themselves, and treat every person accordingly.”
