A new online training program for healthcare providers and staff, family law practitioners, and other family-building professionals aims to increase their ability to welcome and meet the needs of LGBTQ prospective parents.
The Open Door Professional Training Program from Family Equality Council is designed for family-building providers including reproductive endocrinologists, OB/GYNs, nurses, pediatricians, midwives, doulas, family law practitioners, pharmacists, surrogacy center staff, holistic health providers, and perinatal social workers. Clearly, it can take a village to create a child, much less raise one—and this new program “not only creates a family-building workforce prepared to engage with LGBTQ prospective parents sensitively during this most vulnerable time, but it also minimizes the need for an individual to have to explain what it means to be transgender and pregnant, bisexual and single, or queer and gender non-conforming while on an exam table in a gown,” according to Family Equality.
Some of us may be lucky enough to live near—and have our insurance cover—queer midwives, doulas, and other family-building professionals, but many are not. “For too long, LGBTQ people have borne the responsibility of educating their healthcare providers and other professionals about what they, as members of the LGBTQ community, need,” explained Amanda Hopping-Winn, chief program officer at Family Equality Council. “As the number of LGBTQ families grows, Family Equality Council is proud to help healthcare providers relieve LGBTQ patients of this burden.”
This need will only increase. “The majority of LGBTQ millennials are considering growing their families in the coming years, and many in our community are leaning more heavily on assisted reproductive technology to grow their families,” said Family Equality Council CEO The Rev. Stan J. Sloan. “We need providers who are prepared to meet the full range of physical and emotional needs that LGBTQ prospective parents have when they show up at their doors.”
The Open Door program consists of self-guided modules that take between 90-180 minutes to complete. They are taught by Trystan Reese, director of family formation at Family Equality, whose own journey to parenthood was chronicled in the inspiring “Accidental Gay Parents” series of the podcast The Longest Shortest Time. Other LGBTQ family-building experts also share their information and wisdom.
The first two modules, Beyond Diversity: LGBTQ 101 (27 lessons) and Trans Fertility Considerations (30 lessons) are available now for $60 each. You can also view a list of providers who have taken the Open Door program (and if yours isn’t on the list, share the link with them).
This program will be a welcome complement to HRC’s All Children — All Families project, which provides training and resources to promote LGBTQ-inclusive policies and affirming practices among child welfare agencies in order to support LGBTQ foster and adoptive parents, prospective parents, and LGBTQ youth in care. I wish such resources had been around when my spouse and I were creating our family 16 years ago, and I’m thrilled on behalf of today’s families that they are now.