To the Leadership of Vanderbilt University Medical Center:

As the members of the Community Advisory Board of the Program for LGBTQ Health at Vanderbilt, we write in the midst of the intentional undermining of confidence in multiple institutions, VUMC among them. We’ve seen this in the form of attacks against providers, researchers, staff and administration, and critically, against patients, their communities of care, and even volunteers. Vanderbilt’s Medical Center, and this program in particular, are no strangers to this type of siege, having endured escalations in vilifying rhetoric, legal harassment, and physical threats against all parties. Then, over the last few days, the siege has been carried out by the Medical Center itself.

With the unannounced closure of the office for the Program for LGBTQ Health, which includes eliminating its staff positions; flatlining vital projects like community-specific volunteer support for patients navigating the Medical Center’s complex system; and terminating certain clinical roles, including its chaplain. In all this, VUMC actively, intentionally, undermines its own professional credo, and harms the very communities for which it has committed to care. The Center’s silence—we have still not been contacted even with this news—is perhaps the most egregious, especially as so many, including this Board, have used every opportunity to relay our concerns.

We have shared as parents who have encountered a strange new silence from our children’s providers; we have shared as patients worried about what records of our care have found their way into the hands of unfriendly actors; we have shared as community members who find ourselves scrambling to minimize the existential threats to ourselves and our communities. We would hope Vanderbilt, with its history of positive, intentional, actions to offer care specific to a variety of persons—would remain committed to protect the care they’ve chosen, and offered, to provide. Yet, VUMC has been quiet—or worse, been quiet about its preemptive scurrying for cover—when those threats most endanger our health, our communities, and our lives. The absence of any communication over these last few days only serves to underscore VUMC’s disingenuous commitment to its own patients; its own staff; and its own promises.

Repeatedly, the Community Advisory Board has sent this message to the Medical Center’s leadership: your silence is itself violence. Even if there are ongoing efforts and strategic maneuvering to maintain the care the Center offers outside of our earshot, the institution’s tight-lip about those efforts with the communities and persons it otherwise seeks to support is, in and of itself, a perpetuation of the hurts they experience elsewhere—and with no small irony, at the very place that has put itself forward as a shelter from that storm. LET US BE CLEAR: To care for those whose lives have been politicized beyond their power or wish for themselves—and care for LGBTQ+ persons has never not been—is to enter a different type of care relationship: one that has different boundaries and requirements from patients, providers, and crucially, from the institution in which they both interact.

This Board, and the community more broadly, needs the Medical Center to stand behind the care it offers, and to not shirk the responsibility of speaking up for the importance of that care for those who receive it. By contrast, and because the members of this Board know first-hand the life-giving, life-saving, impact the Program for LGBTQ Health provides, we have long sacrificed time, tears, effort, and credibility to engage with an institution that has not shared an equal sense of reciprocity. This ends now.

If recent and more-distant history tells us anything, it is that the threats and harms leveled against all of us—persons, communities, and institutions—will continue over the short and long-term. Given this, we must understand ourselves as bound jointly in the community work of ameliorating the hurts the world around us causes, to offer healing in its broadest sense. However, none of this is possible if we’re not working with a foundation of trust. The Community Advisory Board has stepped forward to offer what voice, presence and action it can. We need the leadership of Vanderbilt University Medical Center to commit to the same.

Sincerely,
The Community Advisory Board for the Program for LGBT Health At Vanderbilt