Ischel Gonzalez Kelso (she/her) was born and raised in Omaha, NE. She completed her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biology at College of Saint Mary where she was fairly mediocre on the softball field. She stayed in Omaha and went on to receive her medical degree from Creighton University School of Medicine. She finally got out of Nebraska and moved to Chicagoland to work with a large LGBTQIA+ population at Northwestern Delnor Family Medicine Residency.
A previous attending ran a gender care clinic that she was excited to learn in. Unfortunately, this faculty member left a few months after Ischel started residency and she found herself doing a lot of self-teaching. While taking over care for a lot of gender patients, she also found herself frustrated with a lot of variability in primary care recommendations for trans and gender diverse folx. The more she learned, the more questions she had. This ignited her research interest of strengthening primary care recommendations for gender diverse patients.
During her time in residency, she was able to develop a longitudinal gender care didactic curriculum for the program. She was also fortunate enough to become academic lead resident and continued to find fulfillment in teaching. The passion her attendings had for medicine, learning, and mentoring inspired her to want to also teach the next generation of physicians. To guarantee she taught care for the community to the best of her ability, she applied for fellowship.
She now finds herself in Boston learning about all facets of LGBTQIA+ medicine and has even been pleasantly intimidated by the prospect of taking the AAHIVM exam. She is currently working on writing a chapter for inclusive sexual history taking with Fenway’s Family Medicine department lead, working on a medical self-advocacy tool for intersex folx with Pooja, and is looking into osteoporosis guidelines and screening barriers while at Fenway Health.
Ischel feels very lucky to be getting this education, especially now. During this time, she is finding that her form of resistance will be ensuring many more primary care physicians are more than equipped to take care of the LGBTQIA+ community.
