Zil Goldstein
“My work is very personal to me,” says Zil Goldstein, Associate Medical Director for Transgender Health at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. As a member of the transgender/non-binary community for two decades, Goldstein has witnessed first-hand the struggles that the community goes through, from seeing friends be denied healthcare to losing friends to suicide. “I always quote the statistic [that] ‘40 percent of transgender people attempted suicide’ from the US Trans Survey in 2015, but in real life, this means I’ve lost a lot of friends and loved ones,” she says. But Goldstein is doing what she can to reverse this trend. While working in the Mount Sinai Health System, she helped establish the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, the first of its kind in the New York healthcare world. Now with Callen-Lorde, she’s responsible for ensuring accessible health care for over 4,500 transgender persons. While Goldstein knows that there improving the quality of life for transgender persons isn’t straightforward, she’s dedicated herself specifically to the improvement of health care and gender-affirming treatment, because she believes these are the areas that can have the most impact. “Access to these treatments improves everything — from depression and anxiety outcomes to treatment adherence for chronic diseases — and is so important for TGNB people everywhere,” she tells GO. Recently, she has furthered her goals for improved treatment by obtaining funding to start a free clinic for survivors of sex trafficking, which works both with those forced into sex work as well as voluntary, consensual sex workers. —RK
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