Count Me In

Why we need more health data on LGBTQ communities

- BRIANNA SHARPE

EARLY one October, Nick North arrived at a Calgary hospital feeling a mix of fear and excitement. He had long felt that his body did not match who he was inside: he had been assigned female at birth but did not identify as a woman, and the day had finally come for his gender- affirming top surgery, a procedure to masculinize his chest. But, he recalls, when he handed his paperwork to staff, he had to repeatedly request they call him Nick, not the name on his birth certificate. “If I already know you can’t figure out my pronouns and call me the right name, then how do I trust you with my unconscious body?” North says. “How do I go into that not terrified?”

North remembers hospital stafftelling him not to take it personally, but “you always take it personally,” he says. It had felt just as personal when his psychiatrist told him to wear a swim top to feel more comfortable at the pool with his kids, leaving North to educate him on why having a body he feels comfortable in — not a swim top — would help his dysphoria.