I'm Dr. Joey Tan. My pronouns are he/him. I am a clinical psychologist in the Department
of Family Medicine at UVA, and I also staff the Adult Transgender Health Clinic out in Crozet. My job is to bring behavioral health services into primary care. So for patients receiving their primary care with our gender health clinic, sometimes there are mood challenges like depression, anxiety, maybe challenges related to trauma. Sometimes it's about health behaviors, so diet, exercise, sleep, smoking, and sometimes it's maybe around relationship difficulties and just navigating some of the stresses that come with being a transgender person in our society. So I try to meet patients where they are as a person first, understand their story, and form a positive and collaborative relationship with them. The other thing that patients can expect from me is by the end of our visit together, we have a plan. A plan that we both worked on and collaborated on, and that patients had a really strong say in creating. I often tell patients who are struggling with their identity that, first off, they've come to the right place, that this is a safe place to explore what they're feeling, what they're thinking, what's going on, that they don't have to have it all figured out before they come and talk to me. The second thing that I tell patients is that they're not alone, that other people also have similar struggles and that they can take a little bit of solace in the fact that there might be wisdom from other people to kind of incorporate into their own journey.