Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Transgender (trans) men or transmasculine persons are those who were assigned a female sex at birth but who identify as male or masculine. In a context of pervasive social stigma and discrimination, trans men experience a high burden of poor mental health and barriers to health care. However, the extant evidence is concentrated in developed countries and published research on trans men is low and middle-income countries is almost entirely lacking. India has a well-established trans community that has won advances in health and human rights, including a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that established rights to self-identification and to government social and health benefits. Trans men, however, have been largely overlooked in health and social policymaking in India. A lack of empirical data on the health and human rights situation of trans men in India is among the primary obstacles to the development of policies and practices that reflect their needs. To address this gap, we plan to bring together an interdisciplinary Indian-Canadian team to advance health equity for trans men by conducting the first quantitative study of trans men's health in India, using a community-based research approach. We propose planning activities including a scoping review, community consultations, and a planning retreat. The community consultations will engage trans men, community-based organizations, and healthcare providers to identify data needs, inform the study design, and develop partnerships. The retreat will focus on team-building and development of a CIHR Project Grant application, and the majority of attendees will be community members. As one of the first academic-community collaborations focused specifically on trans men's health in a LMIC, this project may serve as a model for future work and will provide much-needed evidence of trans men's health needs in LMIC.