Women’s pharmacy ends ban on transgendered clients

Cheryl Rossi, Vancouver Courier

A policy that added controversy to the opening of North America’s first women-only pharmacy has been changed. Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women and the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective now welcome transgendered clients and others who self-identify themselves as women. Members of the relatively new local feminist collective the Femininjas are pleased.

“I feel great about this change,” said a transgendered woman and member of the Femininjas who identified herself only as Brook for fear of employment discrimination. “It just means that the trans women in that area, who are probably the most in need of accessing these services, can access these services and that there’s a change in perception.”

When Brook and other Femininjas heard the policy of welcoming only “women born women” had been changed, three of them visited Lu’s to check if it was true. One had her prescriptions transferred from London Drugs to Lu’s and said she was treated with sensitivity and respect.

Caryn Duncan, the longtime executive director of the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective’s resource centre, left the position shortly before the policy change. Duncan said her departure was not a surprise. She said she’d told the collective’s steering committee that she’d stay until the pharmacy, a social enterprise meant to direct profits back into the collective that runs it, was operational, and her departure was delayed because construction took more than a year, rather than the expected three months.

Duncan says collective members have debated for years who they should serve. She denied Brook’s suggestion that a split in opinion on transgendered individuals comes from a generational divide among feminists.

Duncan said it was time for the nearly 40-year-old organization to restructure and the timing of her departure freed up financial resources for the organization. Volunteers are running the resource centre while Lu’s employs a paid pharmacist. Hours at both have been reduced Monday to Thursday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and the pharmacy remains in want of more referrals, said the collective’s new spokesperson, Nataly Richardson. The organization’s website has yet to be updated with the new policy.

Richardson said there’s some truth to Brook’s suggestion that older generations of feminists weren’t confronted with transgender, transsexual and intersex issues in the same way as younger generations. But she said many of the collective’s older feminists give such concerns careful consideration.

The Femininjas wasn’t the only organization pressing the health collective to change its policy. Other groups included Women Against Violence Against Women, Battered Women’s Support Services, RainCity Housing and Qmunity, B.C.’s queer resource centre, according to Brook. Atira Women’s Resource Society wrote the collective to let its members know it did not support the “women born women” policy.

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