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 clinician/healer must both address the disease and seek to know how the medical condition is being experienced by the patient—what impact it has on his or her life and spirit.
The U. S. health care system encourages patients to take more responsibility for their own treatment decisions and expects their doctors to cooperate in that effort. But the guidelines for exercising that responsibility remain very murky indeed.
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.