Doctor Jesse Ehrenfeld sat down with the Washington Blade on Tuesday, weeks ahead of the start of his tenure as the American Medical Association’s first openly gay president and amid an onslaught of legislative attacks targeting trans Americans’ access to healthcare.

“We see the attack on reproductive care, reproductive access, and transgender healthcare as a continuum of government overreach into patient-physician decision making,” Ehrenfeld said.

“We simply will not stand for the government coming in to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship,” such as by passing these laws that “outlaw what we know to be appropriate, evidence-based clinical guidelines-based care,” he said.

An anesthesiologist who served as the Joseph A. Johnson Jr. Distinguished Leadership Professor of anesthesiology, surgery, biomedical informatics & health policy at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine, much of Ehrenfeld’s professional background has been focused on matters of healthcare access, particularly for LGBTQ patients.

Ehrenfeld directs a $560 million philanthropic organization, Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment, while also serving as a consultant for the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group. He was special adviser to former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who served during the Trump administration.

For his research on “understanding how can we use technology to work better for LGBTQ people,” in 2018 Ehrenfeld became the inaugural recipient of the NIH’s Sexual and Gender Minority Research Investigator Award.

He and his team did much of the work for that project at Vanderbilt’s Program for LGBTQ Health, which he co-founded and led for several years “before I took on my current clinical role in Wisconsin.”

“At the end of the day,” Ehrenfeld said, “we’re really about improving access to health care for LGBTQ people, which is a lot of the work that I have been involved in at the AMA and is a core piece of what we’re trying to do nationally through our policy activities.”

In testimony before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee in 2019, Ehrenfeld told lawmakers: “I would like to state unequivocally that there is no medically valid reason—including a diagnosis of gender dysphoria—to exclude transgender individuals from military service.”

Last year, far-right anti-trans pundit Matt Walsh targeted Vanderbilt’s Transgender Health Clinic on his podcast, leading conservative lawmakers in Tennessee to call for investigations of the institution based on information the university claims was “misrepresented” or taken out of context.

“It’s deeply personal for me,” Ehrenfeld said. “Almost everybody that I helped recruit and hire at Vanderbilt, their personal information was shared online. Their names were on TV. And that has had a chilling effect [both] there and in many places across the country, as there have been attempts to intimidate and threaten practitioners who are providing what we know is evidence based appropriate care.”

A big moment for Ehrenfeld and the AMA

Ehrenfeld will be inaugurated as AMA president on June 13, midway through Pride month. It will be an exciting time, he said. “The AMA will have our first contingent walking in the Chicago Pride Parade…so, my husband and the family and the kids will all be there with a bunch of AMA colleagues celebrating at the end of June.”

“It’s an exciting moment for the organization, but I think also for the community for a bunch of reasons,” Ehrenfeld said. “One is, you know, to be an out person in a very visible role, I think sends a message to patients in the community as well as LGBTQ physicians and other healthcare workers, that their needs are being heard in a way that hasn’t always happened,” notwithstanding “challenges that are happening in many places on the legislative level.”

On a personal level, he said, “growing up, I didn’t have a lot of LGBTQ role models in college and medical school who I saw as defining a career pathway for me.” This meant “I would often question, ‘would I have a role? Was there a place for me as an out person in medicine, in leadership, doing policy work, trying to make the community healthier and improve access to health care?'”

Ehrenfeld said his leadership of the AMA marks an “important moment” in the organization’s history, demonstrating what is now possible for LGBTQ people who historically were denied these types of opportunities.

Anti-trans laws worsen systemic issues in healthcare

“The AMA opposes any policy “that creates a barrier between a patient and their doctor making a decision that’s in the patient’s best interests,” Ehrenfeld said, which includes “efforts to ban care for transgender people” at the state and federal level. “We stand for the science, the evidence, [and] the clinical guidelines that we know lead to better outcomes for patients.”

Even beyond healthcare restrictions that are passed legislatively, “we have a lot of backseat drivers trying to tell doctors what to do,” Ehrenfeld said, like “insurance companies who put up barriers around prior authorization for getting approval for care and services.”

“Those things are real and they cause people to give up trying to get the care they need,” he said.

Six states have passed laws criminalizing certain healthcare interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria, which carry the specter of felony charges for healthcare providers. These, Ehrenfeld said, are the most “heartbreaking” for him personally.

Survey data says one in five physicians is experiencing signs of burnout, with an increase beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, Ehrenfeld said. “That burnout is only exacerbated when you find yourself practicing in a place where a law is passed that tells you how to practice or [tells you] that you can’t practice.”

“That causes moral injury to a physician who finds an untenable choice: provide the care that they know is in the patient’s best interests, or break the law and [potentially] go to jail,” Ehrenfeld said. “And that stress is real. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t hear from a colleague who says I can’t take it anymore.”

Beyond impacts felt by individual healthcare workers, “we’ve seen a drop in the number of physicians who are applying for training positions in states where care is being restricted,” he said. “When, suddenly, you don’t have specialists and internists and primary care providers working in a state, that impacts care for everybody.”

Anti-trans legislative restrictions on healthcare are increasingly targeting adults, too. Florida’s S.B. 254, which would allow the state to take children away from parents who facilitate their access to best-practices treatments for gender dysphoria, would also bar all Floridians from accessing gender affirming care via telehealth, or that which is administered by nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants.

“Telehealth is particularly important for a lot of LGBTQ people because of access distance challenges and the need to seek care in places that often is not immediately local,” Ehrenfeld said.

“There’s this cascading effect of, unfortunately reducing access to care that’s very concerning to me and to the AMA,” he said.

When laws proscribe healthcare interventions that “we know to be appropriate,” Ehrenfeld said, “we use every avenue available” – from pressuring the National Governors Association to filing lawsuits and amicus briefs in coordination with other stakeholders as well as “work on the policy side at the federal level and with our state partners.”