Trey Lowery, 33, said he was constantly misgendered during a stay at Highland Hospital in July. PHOTO BY GINO FANELLI
discrimination regulations under the Affordable Care Act did not apply to transgender people. Biden administration officials said the new policy was required by a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that LGBTQ workers were protected from employment discrimination. The doctor who treated Smith at Highland, whose name CITY is withholding because he was never formally charged or found to have acted inappropriately by a court of law, now practices in Ohio. A message left for him was not returned. “They just didn’t treat me right,” Smith said. Nearly four years after his stay at Highland, in August 2018, officials overseeing quality control and patient experience for the University of Rochester Medical Center, which runs Highland, publicly apologized to Smith and 14 CITY SEPTEMBER 2021
vowed to do better for transgender patients. The apology, from URMC’s Associate Chief Quality Officer Michael Leonard and Chief Patient Experience Officer Jackie Beckerman, was published in the LBGTQ advocacy group Out Alliance’s monthly magazine, Empty Closet, in response to an earlier cover story about Smith’s treatment at Highland. “Mr. Smith taught us so much,” the letter read in part. “In doing so, he has been a catalyst for UR Medicine, helping to accelerate and expand the work underway to improve healthcare delivery for our transgender community.” The letter touted strides the hospital system had made to improve, including doing away with gender identifiers on patient wristbands and a willingness to change a person’s name and
gender in its records to reflect a person’s legal status, as well as list preferred names, gender identity, and pronouns prominently in the medical charts of people who are in the process of transitioning. It also cited a gender health services clinic at Golisano Children’s Hospital. Highland, though, doesn’t acknowledge that its medical care for Smith was anything other than appropriate. “UR Medicine believes that Mr. Smith received appropriate medical treatment at Highland Hospital in response to his need for emergency care in November 2014,” read a statement from the hospital to CITY. “This is based on a thorough review of the medical record by clinical professionals on Highland’s patient safety team, a review which included interviews with Mr. Smith’s attending physicians and other caregivers.”
A ‘DEGRADING’ EXPERIENCE Despite the changes that URMC officials insisted were implemented in response to Smith’s experience, Lowery claims to have received similar treatment. He recalled feeling “degraded” during his time in the hospital’s general surgery inpatient unit on the sixth floor. “When I go to my primary doctor they don’t even give me a pregnancy test, so why would you degrade me and do that and feel like it’s okay?” Lowery said. “And then I get upstairs and it’s constantly ‘she, she, she, she’ throughout the whole stay of me being there.” Lowery’s wife, Quenisha Lowery, and his mother, Cheryln Smith, echoed his complaints. Quenisha said nurses continued to refer to her husband as a woman even after being corrected. CONTINUED ON PAGE 16