The social determinants of health (SDHs), is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO), as being “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age” that are “shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources” (World Health Organisation, 2014). According to Pega and Veale (2015), SDHs include education, occupation, income, gender, ethnicity/race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It should be noted that sexual orientation was added as an SDH by the authors due to an article by Logie (2012), who found that people from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, or queer (LGBTQ) sexual orientations faced pronounced negative health biases. The authors argue that gender identity should be added as an SDH, as it was found that prejudice, transphobia, and other violent and biased behaviours aimed at transgender people resulted in differential amounts of societal exclusion for groups of people defined by gender identity, encompassing healthcare scenarios. These socially conditions cripple transgender people via social exclusion, and benefit non-transgendered people through social inclusion. Although gender identity itself does not predict health status, it socially stratifies the population into different exposures to SDHs such as transphobia. Gender identity draws equal comparability to items on the SDHs list like sexual orientation (Logie, 2012) and ethnicity (World Health Organisation, 2008) by discriminating on the basis of racism or homophobia. These are socially constructed forms of discrimination, and as such are deemed avoidable, remediable, and unfair.
It has been found in multiple studies that socioeconomic status (SES) is a basic cause of diseases (Link & Phelan, 1995, 1996; Phelan et al., 2004; Phelan, Link, & Tehranifar, 2010). This scenario was true when infectious diseases ran rampant, and are especially true now when