Feminism plays critical roles in innovating health care policies and practices. Feminist insights into clinicians as gatekeepers to gender-transition interventions can help resist tendencies to pathologize transgender.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(11):1132-1138. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.11.msoc1-1611.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
An attempt to investigate correlations between race, attitudes, and contraceptive use did not find meaningful associations between race and attitudes about birth control or pregnancy that could influence contraceptive choice.
The revisions balance a growing understanding of gender identity disorders and societal views with the need to retain conditions that benefit from intervention and the removal of which would hamper patients’ ability to receive medical treatment.