AMA Journal of Ethics^®

The informed consent model for gender-affirming medical treatment emphasizes patient autonomy in choosing care without involving mental health professionals.

This month, AMA Journal of Ethics' theme editor Cameron Waldman, a second-year medical student at Albany Medical College, interviewed Aron Janssen, MD, about how healthcare professionals can better serve their transgender patients.

In referring transgender patients for medical transition, clinicians should be guided by harm reduction, respect for autonomy, and continuity of care.

Physicians should extend gender-affirming treatment to gender-nonconforming people, who experience discrimination and health disparities.

In referring transgender patients for medical transition, clinicians should be guided by harm reduction, respect for autonomy, and continuity of care.

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.

Although patients’ medical gender transition can be facilitated by counseling, as a matter of medical ethics, informed consent must be obtained for treatment.

AMA Journal of Ethics theme editor Arina Evgenievna Chesnokova, MPH, a third-year medical student at Baylor College of Medicine, interviewed Megan Sandel, MD, MPH about how physicians can establish partnerships with attorneys.

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.