Building an understanding of transgender care

The needs of transgender people are little understood in all sectors of society. The Lancet 2016 Transgender Health Series provided a much-needed analysis of the social, legal, and health-related challenges affecting transgender people and aimed to provide a global framework to improve their health. Some of the issues raised in the Series were the invisibility of transgender people because of scarce legal recognition, inability to establish their health risks and disease burden because of inadequate data, and stigma that keeps individuals out of health services. Although some progress has been made, with more countries legislating to allow people to change their legal gender, adopting self-determination as a gold standard to define gender identity, or providing health