‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’: Volunteers Fight Nationwide Erasure of Queer Identities

Mural above APNH check-in desk. Credit - Patch Bowen, Horseshoe Magazine 2025

Early into Hartford Healthcare’s partnership with the University of New Haven, pediatric gender services and programs were terminated. Since July, medication management for youth under 19 has ended, as well as counseling programs and access to gender affirming surgeries and treatments. (See last edition of Horseshoe Magazine, Fall 2025, for context on this issue.)

Students at University of New Haven must still beat steep obstacles to receive gender affirming care. These pediatric services are needed for students living with gender dysphoria to feel wholly themselves.

As the federal government worsens transgender erasure nationwide, reliable access to these services have become life-saving. How are the local West Haven & New Haven communities staying alive?

Nonprofits like A Place to Nourish your Health ask these hard questions, as the Center for Disease Control winds back progress in medical inclusivity.

“So funding remains a tenuous- an unpredictable, funding remains an unpredictable force,” said Melanie DeFillipo, preventative care services manager for APNH. “We have got two sources of funding. We have the state prevention grant…, which is funded by the state of Connecticut through the CDC. And we also have a separate grant that is direct funded from the CDC.”

Recently, the Department of Education’s office for civil rights sent communications to universities, including UNewHaven, about removing DEI programming. The Center for Disease Control released the same letter to recipients of federal grant funding. As soon as executive orders regarding diversity and inclusion were signed in January 2025, the CDC sent email notices to nonprofit grant recipients like APNH to remove all references to atypical genders or sexualities from patient documentation.

 A shocking exclusion was the intersex population, who in recent years have been advocated fiercely for by activists and pediatricians alike. Backslides in nonbinary inclusion are evident with this administration.

“The way that the template for 2025 looks is the gender identity question is completely stricken,” said DeFillipo, over a copy of patient onboarding forms she provided directly from the CDC. “It doesn't even say ‘client assigned at birth’, it just says ‘client sex’; and it says ‘male’, ‘female’. There's no option to decline there.”

Without a strong body of data to be studied on the STI/STD transmission trends within various transgender and nonbinary populations, DeFillipo explains, no path for prevention is possible. Their dedication to their role is their own personal oath to protect patients from paper genocide.

APNH staff are determined alongside them to maintain these prevention programs. “To take kind of the will of

the government and still do important work” said DeFilipo, “and, you know, to make sure that their needs are taken care of and that they're not being pushed out of services.”