Vanderbilt U LGBTQ Health Lays Off Employees and Cuts ‘Trans Buddy Program’
“At this time, when we should be supporting our transgender and larger LGBTQ community members, VUMC Administration continues to show they are not willing to help us.”
Isn’t it fascinating to see which things get cut when the going gets tough?
The College Fix reports:
Vanderbilt LGBTQ Health lays off employees, cuts ‘Trans Buddy Program’
The Vanderbilt Program for LGBTQ Health recently laid off five staff members and eliminated its “Trans Buddy Program” following $300 million in budget cuts at the school’s medical center.
“The Vanderbilt University Medical Center Program for LGBTQ Health is an innovative effort to improve healthcare for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) adults,” according to its website.
The five staff members who lost their jobs included the director, assistant director, and the coordinator of the “Trans Buddy Program,” according to The Vanderbilt Hustler.
“The Trans Buddy Program paired transgender patients with a support volunteer who could provide emotional, informational and procedural support during healthcare encounters, free of charge,” the outlet reported.
The Tennessee Transgender Task Force criticized the decision in a June 27 Instagram post, accusing VUMC of harming “an already marginalized community.”
“At this time, when we should be supporting our transgender and larger LGBTQ community members, VUMC Administration continues to show they are not willing to help us,” the group wrote.
“The implications will be felt throughout the community as the Program was able to connect many people who already have hesitations about interacting with the healthcare complex due to sexual orientation or gender identity to culturally competent and affirming care inside or outside of the VUMC system,” it wrote.
The task force also posted an open letter written by the Vanderbilt Program for LGBTQ Health Community Advisory Board telling the medical center its “silence is itself violence.”
“Even if there are ongoing efforts and strategic maneuvering to maintain the care the Center offers outside of our earshot, the institution’s tight-lip about those efforts with the communities and persons it otherwise seeks to support is, in and of itself, a perpetuation of the hurts they experience elsewhere-and with no small irony, at the very place that has put itself forward as a shelter from that storm,” the letter states.
The layoffs follow the medical center’s recent announcement that around 650 employees were cut “in response to budgetary actions in Washington D.C. that impacted areas related to government-sponsored research and patient care,” according to The Vanderbilt Hustler.
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Comments
This goes back a bit, but in 2020 Vandy had more staff than students in their graduate program. It was 2.4 staff to every student. I don’t think much has changed.
“The Trans Buddy Program paired transgender patients with a support volunteer who could provide emotional, informational and procedural support during healthcare encounters, free of charge”
Meanwhile, Big Brothers / Big Sisters are struggling to maintain their program to mentor fatherless and motherless youth across all political and racial spectra. Good work, Vanderbilt!
Your headline is misleading. Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center are two separate entities. Some VUMC doctors also serve as VU faculty members, but that’s about all that’s shared. The two entities split in April of 2016.
It’s a shame that the VUMC leadership had to lie in order to justify the cuts (not these LGBTMOUSE cuts) that have been made, claiming that cuts in Medicare and Medicaid will cause a budget shortfall. They initially claimed that they would be $250 million short and forced departments to cut budgets. Then they came out with this $300 million shortfall number, and said staff would have to be let go. One wonders how many millions of dollars have been spent in the last five years on DEI junk.