The social institutions of medicine and the state have a complex history of interaction in which doctors have been the originators of political ideals, goals, and social change but equally often have found themselves to be instruments of political authority.
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.
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.
Connections between racism and dehumanization have immediate, lethal, deleterious, longer-term consequences. Lessons from Nazi eugenics and human experimentation still apply.
AMA J Ethics. 2021;23(1):E64-69. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2021.64.