Digital Transgender Archive

Interview with Dr. Colton St. Amand

An interview with Dr. Colton St. Amand, a transgenderqueer Two Spirit man, Texas Licensed Clinical Psychologist, and family medicine physician resident with a concentration in gender and sexuality care. St. Amand is affiliated with the University of Houston Department of Psychology and Baylor College of Medicine, is a Family Medicine resident at the Mayo Clinic, and is a co-founder of Gender Infinity, an organization that hosts conferences and gatherings for trans and gender non-conforming youth and their families. Additionally, he is the author of Stacey's Not A Girl and was a co-editor of the American Psychological Association's handbook The Gender Affirmative Model: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive Children. In this oral history interview, St. Amand discusses his beginnings, development, and experiences as a trans practitioner within the field of trans health care, his experiences within large trans health care organizations like WPATH [the World Professional Association for Transgender Health] and USPATH, the continuing barriers to trans people's access to quality, gender-affirming health care, and his visions of a better future. Specifically, he discusses the history of pathologization of trans people and gatekeeping and refusal of gender-affirming health care by cisgender health care practitioners, the continuing moral panic over trans and gender non-conforming children accessing gender-affirming health care, the difference between a model of care based on identity and one based on embodiment, and examples of positive, informed-consent trans health care models.