Statement Prepared for the 2/20/2025 Media Briefing with Plaintiffs by Lambda
My name is Lance Toma. I am the CEO of San Francisco Community Health Center. We believe that the most vulnerable and marginalized members of our community deserve access to the highest-quality, whole-person health care; and we work to foster resilience, strength, connection, and belonging for our communities. For nearly 40 years, we have provided culturally competent, comprehensive health care services to LGBTQ+ individuals with a concerted focus on transgender individuals, people of color, individuals experiencing homelessness, and people living with or vulnerable to HIV.
We are a federally qualified health center and provide primary medical, behavioral, and dental health care, alongside substance use disorder treatment, mental health counseling, gender affirming care, case management, and HIV prevention and outreach services to over 5000 clients annually. Of our patients, 25% are trans or gender non-conforming; 70% are people of color; and 60% are homeless or marginally housed.
The ultimate impact of these Executive Orders is that the very existence of trans and gender non-conforming individuals will be eliminated in the eyes of the federal government and they will be stripped of the lifesaving resources that are critical to their individual wellness and self-realization. Furthermore, they will be increasingly subject to an engulfing climate of fear, terror, and discrimination. At our health center, we have already seen a dramatic increase in depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideology amongst our patients, clients, and staff members.
Our services are grounded in health equity and racial justice. We have spent decades advocating alongside our federal partners to collect data on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, and then to disaggregate this data to reveal the inequities in the delivery of care to the most vulnerable members of society. These data revealed findings that prompted a response by previous federal administrations to fund racial and gender-specific programs and services and to focus on medically underserved communities. The Executive Orders effectively erase these critical data and threatens the very existence of all of our health center’s programs and services.
Without the care we provide, negative health outcomes will explode, emergency room visits will overburden our City’s safety net system, and diseases such as HIV and viral hepatitis will rampantly and unnecessarily spread within these communities and beyond; we anticipate a rate of new HIV infections as we have not seen in many decades, which will take years and millions of dollars to bring back down amidst many lives lost. As the only primary care provider for homeless individuals in San Francisco, if our street medicine services were to stop, ongoing care and lifesaving treatment will be halted and hard fought health outcomes will reverse immediately.
We will not sit by and let this happen without a fight and we are proud to stand alongside our fellow plaintiffs and legal counsel Lambda Legal to do everything in our power to protect the vital lifesaving services that all of us do collectively in service of our LGBTQ communities.
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