Everyone at the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics is forever grateful for the constant encouragement and support we are shown by our members, subscribers, readers, authors, and guest-editors. As we celebrate our 50th year, we remain humbled and thankful to be allowed to be the caretakers of a publication that began before we were born and will continue long after we have all left our offices in Boston. We do recognize, however, that the popularity of the Journal can sometimes be both a blessing and a curse. There can sometimes be a multi-year waiting list to publish symposiums or individual articles in JLME. In our fields, (including medicine, law, public policy, public health, and many more disciplines) timeliness is often crucial. And with the unceasing demand to be published in JLME, immediate publication is often in short supply. Truth be told, we can only do the best we can, and we must sometimes rely on serendipity to make certain that symposium topics we have booked years before remain relevant on the day they are published.
Sadly, serendipity and the United States Supreme Court provided almost perfect timing for this issue’s symposium. The court’s decisions in Dobbs v. Jackson, returning the full power to regulate abortion laws to the states, has led to wider and more aggressive moves by the right to regulate other facets of American life solely through the purview of the states. This has led to a wide array of concerns around a number of deeply important issues, including whether trans people in our country will enjoy equal protection under our laws and peace in their daily lives. Into this world steps this issue’s guest-editors, Heather Walter-McCabe and Alexander Chen, who present the symposium “Transgender Health Equity and the Law.” The guest-editors write in their introduction that
The papers in this symposium demonstrate the profound and cumulative benefits of incremental policy changes and advancements in learning that have steadily improved health outcomes over time. Whether the reader seeks to garner a beginning understanding of transgender health equity, or is a scholar, practitioner, or policymaker already involved in this work, we hope this symposium provides an enhanced understanding of the public health imperative of working to improve health equity for transgender communities, and how law and policy can be used as a tool to do so.
This issue was generously funded by Wayne State University, and all papers in the collection will be open access for all readers, courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We thank all of our funders and, of course, all of our editors and authors. There will be a live conference to mark the release of this issue on October 17, 2022 at Wayne State. We hope to see some of you there, and we thank you all, as always, for your continued support of our work.
