It feels uncontroversial to say that healthcare should be human-centered. How can you effectively provide care without understanding patients’ bodies and their lives? 

Sadly, that’s a question many queer and trans people find themselves asking.

For these communities, healthcare can be a parade of indignities. The seemingly arbitrary barriers to care. The lack of understanding of the sex that you have or treatments that you seek — stemming at least partially from the average US med school spending six hours or less over four years on queer and trans health. And, most troublingly, the potential for harm — more than half of all LGBTQIA+ people face discrimination while seeking medical care, while 7% of cisgender queer folks and 22% of trans folks are actively assaulted in healthcare settings.

There’s potential to sidestep some of these things by going to health centers catering specifically to the queer community, but they’re geographically few and far between and subject to high demand and long waits.

And so, queer and trans people are left with a cruel irony: the system in society that should arguably be most humane and healing can often feel dehumanizing or cause harm. 

Enter Folx Health, the first healthcare platform designed specifically for queer and trans people. 

In the words of founder A.G. Breitenstein, Folx exists “ . . .to provide medical services that support who you are, celebrate who you are, and help you achieve what is important for you in terms of sex, gender, and family” — to reorient healthcare around “our lives, not a diagnosis.”

In practice, this means acting as an archetypical People’s Champion — radically rethinking every part of the healthcare process through the lens of their community’s needs. Take, for example, an experience as fundamental as interacting with your doctor. Folx shifts this from nerve-wracking to affirming by hiring clinicians with years of experience with LGBTQIA+ people and by radically shifting the balance of power — moving beyond patient centricity to patient control through a system of informed consent, where the doctor acts less as a dictator or gatekeeper and more as a trail guide. And, by offering this service through telemedicine, Folx dramatically expands access — even folks outside big cities can get the care they deserve.

Since its launch in December 2020, Folx has grown to 33 states and expanded its offer around areas where traditional healthcare most lets queer people down: identity, sex, and family. As such, core services today include HRTs, PrEP, ED meds, and the ecosystem around those (discrete prescription deliveries, at-home lab tests, and unlimited clinician consults). It has ambitions to expand both its footprint and offer in 2022.

Beyond that, Folx has established an HRT Care Fund using microgrants to cover treatments for folks who can’t afford them and an online Library aiming to democratize access to good queer medical information. 

Any one of the steps Folx has taken is innovative in its own right but, taken together, they represent a sea change in how healthcare can serve queer and trans people.

Liston Pitman is a Strategist at eatbigfish.