Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld is the first out LGBTQ person to become president of the American Medical Association (AMA). In his inaugural speech yesterday, he drew on his experience as a gay dad with a newborn son to highlight “inequities and injustices in medicine.” He also urged fighting the “criminalization of care,” a reference to bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth.
A Child’s Emergency
In addition to being the first LGBTQ person to be AMA president, Ehrenfeld is also the first AMA president to have kids while in office, he said in a tweet. In his speech at the AMA’s annual meeting in Chicago, he acknowledged his husband, attorney Judd Taback, and his two sons, 4-year-old Ethan and 4-month-old Asher, who were in the audience. Ethan was born 10 weeks early, he then related. He weighed only 2 pounds, 7 ounces, and had to spend 49 days in a neonatal ICU. Ehrenfeld said:
As new parents—seeing our child struggle was unimaginable. In those kinds of moments, you want to do everything possible, and give anything you can, to help your child’s recovery.
When he was just a few weeks old, Ethan needed a blood transfusion. And as an anesthesiologist, I have given thousands of units of blood to hundreds of patients.
But at this moment, watching my son cling to life, I was struck by the painful reality that, even though I was a physician and now, a father … neither I, nor my husband, could donate blood—simply because we are gay.
Discriminatory policies—policies rooted in stigma, not science—barred us from doing the most humane of acts, donating our blood.
Thankfully, Ethan got the blood he needed. But that feeling of helplessness lingered with me for some time.
I tell this story because I want people to understand what we mean when we talk about inequities and injustices in medicine.
He noted that the FDA recently rescinded some of those policies, “thanks in large part to a decade of advocacy by our AMA and others, making it possible for my husband and I to give someone else’s child a much-needed blood transfusion.”
Fighting Inequity and Injustice
Ehrenfeld went on to discuss the inequities and poorer outcomes that remain in medicine for Black people, LGBTQ youth, and others.
He also noted that he was the same age as Matthew Shepard, the gay college student brutally murdered in 1998, just after Ehrenfeld himself had come out to close college friends. Ehrenfeld went into the Navy under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and began his medical career before the AMA had an LGBTQ Advisory Committee or Section. “There were no policy discussions that focused on the health needs of my community,” he said, and “few openly gay physicians to look up to.” In 2001, at the first AMA conference he attended, he said, “I had an unshakable feeling of insecurity, knowing that as a gay man in medicine I was an outsider who might never be accepted for who I was.”
Ehrenfeld, however, started an LGBTQ committee in his state medical society during his residency, despite being told it would end his career. “Standing on this stage tonight and accepting the honor of the AMA presidency is proof that our organization can evolve,” he asserted.
He spoke of other challenges for the medical profession today, too, including substance abuse disorders, firearm violence, a mental health crisis, and physician burnout in the wake of the COVID pandemic. He also alluded to the bans on the abortion pill mifepristone and on providing gender-affirming care to trans youth, saying:
Our AMA has a duty to call out politically appointed judges who would upend 80 years of FDA precedent and threaten access to critical drugs long proven to be safe and effective.
We have a duty to push back against legislative interference in the practice of medicine that is leading to the criminalization of care.
While he did not explicitly mention transgender youth in this speech, an earlier interview with the Advocate makes it clear he is talking about them here. “It is imperative that we expand, not contract, care for trans youth,” he told the publication. “We have to reassess how we improve the quality of healthcare for trans youth and adults in the face of government intrusion into the practice of medicine.” He also spoke there of the need to understand and address mental health challenges for LGBTQ youth more broadly and “to ensure that they have access to the care and support they need.”
And he said to NBC News:
States that ban abortion, that ban health care for transgender youth are placing the government right into the patient-physician relationship. And we know that this leads to devastating health consequences and can jeopardize lives. The AMA continues to speak out against these kinds of actions.
On Monday, the AMA passed a resolution “to oppose any and all criminal and other legal penalties against patients seeking gender-affirming care and against parents and guardians who support minors seeking and receiving gender-affirming care.”
LGBTQ Advocate
Ehrenfeld is no newcomer to LGBTQ and trans-specific advocacy. He has been chair of the Massachusetts Committee on LGBT Health, chair of the Massachusetts General Hospital LGBT Employee Resource Group, a member of the Board Committee on Quality at Fenway Community Health Center, and a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ LGBTI Liaison Group. He co-founded the Vanderbilt Program for LGBTQ Health.
Additionally, Ehrenfeld is a Navy combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom and Resolute Support Mission. When he was deployed, he publicly asked then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter about his thoughts on transgender servicemembers, who at the time, could still be discharged for being trans. Carter said that the important criteria was “Are they going to be excellent service members? And I don’t think anything but their suitability for service should preclude them.”
A recent article on Ehrenfeld by the Harvard School of Public Health asserts, “When the ban was repealed in 2016, Ehrenfeld’s question was described by Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning as the spark that led to its end.”
A passionate photographer, Ehrenfeld also took many photos documenting the lives of LGBTQ service members during his deployments. He also took video and stills of Airman Logan Ireland for the documentary Transgender, at War and in Love, which won a White House News Photographers Association award in 2015 and was nominated for an Emmy. His work is also in the feature film TransMilitary.
Doctor, Professor, Researcher
Additionally, Ehrenfeld is anesthesiologist, senior associate dean, and tenured professor of anesthesiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he leads the largest statewide health philanthropy, the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment. He is also an adjunct professor of anesthesiology and health policy at Vanderbilt University and adjunct professor of surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. He has co-authored 18 clinical textbooks and received numerous awards for his research, including the inaugural NIH Sexual and Gender Minority Research Award.
Looking Forward
In today’s world, he said, “Too often, it seems like many have forgotten the rules Ethan is learning in pre-kindergarten about sharing, being kind, and accepting others.” Yet despite the challenges and injustices that exist in medicine and in society, he chooses to be optimistic rather than discouraged:
I choose optimism because even though I once stood in the back of this very room afraid of being rejected for who I was … I now stand before you as the first openly gay president of our AMA, proudly representing everyone in this room, including everyone who has ever, or will ever, feel like an outsider.
He called on the AMA and his fellow physicians to “work to make sure all our patients are seen, heard, and accepted as they are.”
Watch his full speech here: