Although an estimated 11 million people in the U.S. identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ), nursing research and scholarship on the community’s health needs has historically lagged that of other demographics.
New York’s Dr. Caroline Dorsen is changing that.
Growing up a few blocks from Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn — an iconic site of the gay liberation movement — LGBTQ rights and social justice issues were always on her mind. Nursing, however, didn’t catch her attention until she graduated with a degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.
“I was interested in the impact of culture on health,” says Dorsen. “And as I got deeper into medical anthropology, the role of nurses and nurse practitioners was really appealing. They were educators, advocates, clinicians and public-health minded people.”
Dorsen is now a certified nurse practitioner, with a Ph.D. in nursing research and theory development. And she, too, now juggles roles as an educator, advocate and clinician.
The New York native is an assistant professor at New York University’s (NYU) Rory Meyers College of Nursing, where she teaches and researches how gender identity and sexual orientation impact a person’s health. It’s scholarship that researchers are only now realizing the importance of, she says.
“We have a whole generation of people who, for them, this was not on their radar and not something we learned about in school,” says Dorsen.
