Tristan Marvin Zapanta Uy
I am Tristan Marvin Zapanta Uy (they/them), and I am currently a second-year clinical fellow in pediatric endocrinology at the Yale School of Medicine. It’s been such a winding road getting here. I graduated from a 7-year combined liberal arts and medicine program in the Philippines back in 2015, then I was briefly a general practitioner in an underserved rural area (and doing public health research on the side), before I started a 3-year pediatrics residency program in the Philippine General Hospital (a state-owned tertiary hospital) in Manila. I finished residency training early 2020 – and we all know what happened next! During the COVID pandemic, I was a hospitalist in pediatrics at a tertiary infectious disease center, but in my heart of hearts, I really wanted to shift gears and do more public health research. In 2021, I started doing medical writing for an Asia-Pacific medical communications company and gained experience doing systematic reviews and writing consensus guidelines for the region. By 2022, I was lucky enough to be doing my MPH in Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), with a concentration on public health advocacy for sexual and gender minoritized groups. That was how I got connected with the Yale Gender Program and the lovely pediatric endocrinologists working there, who subsequently introduced me to this fellowship program.
Within the realm of pediatric endocrinology, I am most passionate about health equity research for transgender, gender diverse, and gender minoritized groups. Right now, I am focused on examining the role of binary sex assignment at birth in the formation of stigma around gender diversity – and re-evaluating this practice in medicine, as well as the related binary practices in pediatric endocrinology throughout growth and puberty.
If you had asked me in 2015 if I would be choosing pediatric endocrinology as a career, I would have said there was no way. And if you had asked me a year ago for the reason I’m doing this fellowship, I would have said I’m in it solely for the field of gender-affirming care. However, during my time in fellowship so far, I’ve met several people who are so passionate about their respective fields and the respective communities they serve – from diabetes to thyroid to bone – that every day, I discover more and more reasons to love pediatric endocrinology. At the end of the day, I think what continues to draw me to this specialty is that, at its core, pediatric endocrinology is a (very) social and behavioral science (and there’s still so much equity work that could be done!).
Definitely, there are more folks that have inspired me than I can mention here. Some that really stand out are the people I met at the Yale Gender Clinic in January of 2023 (and to whom I am forever grateful): Dr Christy Olezeski, Dr Susan Boulware, and Dr Anisha Patel. And, of course, I would not have been there if I had not taken courses at YSPH under Katie Wang, PhD (Stigma and Health) and Ali Miller, JD (Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights). As a migrant worker, a huge part of my community is in the Philippines. A lot of people back there have had to make sacrifices for me to be where I am – and I want to hold space for all of them, even if I could not name each one here.
I would like to believe that despite the twists and turns, I have done my best to be intentional in my career choices leading up to this point. So many experiences have shaped this path, but I think growing up queer in a conservative small town, in the middle of nowhere, drives most of the work I want to do and, also, the meaning I try to find in it. There is no denying that I’ve enjoyed so much privilege to even get into this fellowship program, so I want to try and use it to be instrumental in uplifting my community, as well as all minoritized groups that I am given the opportunity to uplift.