| Pride Month – June
June was Pride Month which aims to raise awareness on how damaging homophobia can be as well as being more understanding of those in the LGBT+ community. The PDA LGBT+ Network works to enable all pharmacists in the LGBT+ community to realise their full potential and raise their profile by being educationally, socially and politically active.
Read more |
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| Global Pride Day – June 27, 2021
To mark Global Pride Day, the PDA LGBT+ Network collaborated with Troglo to produce a FREE factsheet on Sexuality and Gender to raise awareness and to help others to be more understanding of those in the LGBT+ community.
Read more and download the factsheet here |
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PDA LGBT+ Network pronoun badges
Wearing a pronoun badge is a simple but effective way of signalling that you respect people’s pronouns and their gender identity. This can mean a lot for colleagues and patients who may feel invisible, or who may be struggling with their gender identity within the pharmacy context.
Pronoun badges can also help to open up conversations about gender identity and raise awareness of gender diversity. Thank you to all PDA LGBT+ Network members who have contributed to the design of the pronoun badges and the flyer that accompanies them.
Learn more
- Find out more and place your FREE order here
Get involved
- Take a selfie with your pronoun badge and share on social media using #PDAlgbt. Don’t forget to tag the PDA into your post. Click on one of the icons at the bottom of this email to follow us on social media.
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Is the pharmacy profession a ‘hostile environment’ for trans pharmacists?
By Scott Rutherford (he/they), PDA LGBT+ Network President and third-year pharmacy student
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Delving deeper into the General Pharmaceutical Council’s 2019 equalities survey reveals that transgender pharmacists are less likely to work in a role relating to pharmacy than their cisgender counterparts (figure 47). Furthermore, trans pharmacists registered with the GPhC are nearly five times more likely to be working outside of Great Britain and nearly 3 times more likely to be temporarily out of work. It is also concerning that 1% of respondents preferred not to disclose their identity; whilst the report does not speculate on the reasons for this, it is worth putting these statistics into the context of trans rights in the UK.
Earlier this year, several experts quit the government’s LGBT Advisory Panel, citing the ‘hostile environment’ that the government had created towards LGBT people. |
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| Alongside the disappointing approach to Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reform, court cases such as Bell v Tavistock and Forstater v CGD have contributed to an increasingly toxic debate around trans rights. Transphobic narratives known as ‘gender critical’ views seek to invalidate trans identities and have been widely platformed in the media. This culture war has precipitated into significant increases in transphobic hate crime.
Pharmacy does not exist in isolation from the rest of society and, therefore, the aforementioned statistics ought to be viewed as a possible sign that trans pharmacists are escaping, or being excluded, from the British pharmacy profession. LGBT+ people in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are shown to be more likely to want to leave STEM fields than non-LGBT+ people – could this be the situation in pharmacy?
Learn more
Get involved
- Find out more about the PDA LGBT+ Network here
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LGBT+ Queerness in professionalism
By Soh Xi Ken (he/him), PDA LGBT+ Network Honorary Secretary and third-year pharmacy student
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| When it comes to being queer and especially expression of queerness, we seem to run into a roadblock where the “rules” we operate as a profession still relies on the notion of cisheteronormativity.* This is not a unique problem that pharmacists in the UK face. In fact, teachers in Canada face a similar issue, where people weaponize what they think queerness is and use that against LGBTQ+ professionals.
There can be situations where a professional, who is LGBTQ+, may find themselves in a “glass closet,” should they choose not to come out and act out how people would expect them to be. |
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| This can be detrimental to their mental health, hurt their career options, and generally have their opinion or expertise second-guessed more. I cannot fathom the pain and hurt transgender people experience when I hear stories of trans healthcare professionals being constantly misgendered by their own colleagues, despite insistence on using their correct pronouns.
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Troglo: Sexual Health, Your Way
By the Troglo team
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Sexual health is one of the few areas of healthcare that changes drastically depending on the gender identity and sexual orientation of the individual. |
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| However, for the latter of these two criteria, there are very few service distinctions that have been implemented in the system as a whole, which leaves members of the LGBTQ+ community adrift when it comes to receiving sexual health services through which they can feel comfortable and cared for.
This is why we’re building Troglo. We believe that everybody should be able to access services that allow them to be comfortable as themselves because without that comfort and honesty, the patient suffers. Troglo is a digital clinic platform that provides access to remote sexual health services and pairs them with tailored digital intervention tools. The goal is to build a tailored sexual health clinic offering, with a standardised level of care so nobody gets left behind in the future irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or geography.
We are proud to be collaborating with the PDA to create resources for pharmacists who work with members of our community and hope that together we can make everyone feel more comfortable with the services they receive. |
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LGBT+ Visibility in Leadership
By Scott Rutherford (he/they), PDA LGBT+ Network President and third-year pharmacy student,
and Daniela Rusalim (she/her), PDA LGBT+ Network member, PDA NAWP Vice-President and Community Pharmacist
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PDA members were invited to join an online event where speakers shared their progress, challenges and learnings about increasing diversity and representation in the leadership of the pharmacy professions.
At the Diversity and Representation in the Leadership of the Pharmacy Professions event, Dr Bola Owolabi began by discussing the importance of having a diverse leadership team to reflect the diversity of the communities that they serve.
Dr. Owolabi then introduced the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer’s Clinical Fellow, Natasha Callender, and the Deputy Chief Pharmaceutical Officer, Richard Cattell, who spoke about the Inclusive Pharmacy Practice Plan. |
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| Finally, Paul Bennett and Liz Fidler, CEO of the RPS and President of the Association of Pharmacy Technicians UK discussed their organisations’ positions with regards to inclusion and diversity, and what they are doing about it.
The webinar was an informative introduction to the work being done to ensure that women and those in ethnic minorities are provided with the opportunity to lead within the pharmacy profession. However, it lacked the inclusivity to which it committed. |
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- Follow the PDA LGBT+ Pharmacists’ Network on social media using the hashtag #PDAlgbt
- Please also feel free to share this mailing with a colleague that would like to read it.
- Pharmacists that are not yet members of the PDA LGBT+ Pharmacists’ Network can join here.
- Join the PDA LGBT+ Network Facebook group here.
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