Cardiovascular Care of the Third Gender: Indian Perspective

Abstract

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-Commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https:// us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Cardiovascular disease (CVD) affects everyone, including the transgender. Unfortunately, a significant disparity exists in the care of the transgender compared to the cisgender population. One of the major causes of this disparity is the societal paradigm where gender is viewed as a binary variable. Of late, there has been a transformation in the societal understanding of gender, where gender is being acknowledged as a spectrum worldwide. In April 2014, Supreme Court of India recognized transgender people as the “third gender” in a judgment that also observed that this community faces “large and pronounced discrimination” in health care.1 In India, the transgender population as per the 2011 Census2 is about 4.9 lakhs and their numbers have probably doubled by now.