I was especially conscious of using gender neutral language here because so often medical discourse completely invalidates people outside the allo cis hetero normative assumption. It has also lead to some alarming blind spots in research today.
The fact is that there are no queer people in medical research.
Sure, there’s tons of studies looking at depression and suicide rates in LGBTQ+ teenagers, HIV/AIDS prevalence in gay populations, gender confirmation surgery in trans people. But that's it.
Sure, there’s tons of studies looking at depression and suicide rates in LGBTQ+ teenagers, HIV/AIDS prevalence in gay populations, gender confirmation surgery in trans people. But that's it.
These areas are definitely important but they all focus on *queerness*. Queer people are only interesting medically because they’re queer, it would seem.
Are trans women at risk for osteoporosis? No idea. What’s the prevalence of type II diabetes and heart disease in intersex people? Who knows. Is multiple sclerosis likely to be seen in trans men? Not a clue.
Diagnosis and treatment relies heavily on statistics. From the very first screening, we use likelihood ratios and probabilities to rule in or out conditions that correspond to a patient’s signs and symptoms.
And we only know these because of data compiled from decades of research profiling diseases and their prevalence.
*And we have no research on queer people.*
*And we have no research on queer people.*
The gender binary swallowed them up and spit out a kind a reality where queer people apparently never get sick except as a direct result of their queerness. Where are all the studies that treat them as boring everyday people who get boring everyday diseases?
There aren’t any. And this scares the heck out of me. Whatever your personal views on gender fluidity and queerness, there is no doubt that a significant number of your patients will be gender non conforming, or transgender, or intersex, or non binary.
And the kind of information we need to provide quality medical care takes years to collect, compile, test, retest, verify, and standardise.
So if you are involved in research in any way, push to include more options than Male and Female in your demographics.
So if you are involved in research in any way, push to include more options than Male and Female in your demographics.
Because hopefully at some point America will stop squabbling over bathrooms, and India will stop obsessing about cows and concentrate on what’s important. If medicine always waited for archaic laws and social norms to catch up, we’d never get anywhere.
If we hope to have any sort of accurate, valid, reliable information, we need to start NOW. We're already way behind!
[Link to a sample format of inclusive data collection: (link: transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=lib…) transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=lib…]
[Link to a sample format of inclusive data collection: (link: transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=lib…) transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=lib…]
