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.
Respecting another’s religious beliefs does not compel us to accept that those beliefs have been examined and are autonomously espoused. We come to hold beliefs in a multitude of ways, not all of which are fully informed and uncoerced.
When patient autonomy became a closely held value in medical ethics in the 1960s and '70s, the physician’s conscience-based right to refuse to deliver a given service began to be contested.
Sanism, irrational prejudice against people with mental illness including erroneous and stereotypical beliefs, perverts legal proceedings involving the mentally ill.
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.