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What is Gender Medicine?

Prior to 2000, there was very little discussion about gender medicine. However, with the establishment of the Partnership for Gender Specific Medicine at Columbia University (1997), the Karolinska Institutet (2002), and the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin (2003), studies began to systematically examine comparisons between women and men. In 2001 and 2010, the Institute of Medicine in the U.S. declared that being a woman or a man significantly influenced the course of disease and should be considered in diagnosis and therapy. For starters, gender medicine aims to improve treatment for women as well as for men. It is different than women’s health because it also focuses on men’s health. Gender…

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  Gender medicine ‘built on shaky foundations’, Cass review finds

Analysis finds most research underpinning clinical guidelines, hormone treatments and puberty blockers to be low quality.

  Gender medicine: its historical roots

Gender medicine as a subject began with Bernadine Healy’s 1991 article ‘The Yentl Syndrome’ which showed that women had worse outcomes following heart attacks since their symptoms are different from men. Since then gender-specific clinical research protocols have been progressively included so that evidence for guidelines can be better informed such that women are then less disadvantaged and care become more personalised

 Britain Is Leaving the U.S. Gender-Medicine Debate Behind

The Cass report challenges the scientific basis of medical transition for minors.

 Does medicine shape gender or do gender ideals shape medicine?

Medical advances, and the increase in authority that medicine as an institution gained within society, soon prevented societal gender ideals from shaping medicine. In fact, medicine can now be argued to be the one shaping gender. As the prestige of medicine grew, it also began shaping gender. Importantly however, medicine chose to shape gender strictly according to the gender ideals that were already in place.

 Hilary Cass Says U.S. Doctors Are ‘Out of Date’ on Youth Gender Medicine

Dr. Hilary Cass published a landmark report that led to restrictions on youth gender care in Britain. U.S. health groups said it did not change their support of the care.

 The Battle Over Gender Therapy

More teenagers than ever are seeking transitions, but the medical community that treats them is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them.

 Youth Gender Transition Is Pushed Without Evidence

Every systematic review of evidence to date, including one published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, has found the evidence for mental-health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty. By contrast, the risks are significant and include sterility, lifelong dependence on medication and the anguish of regret. For this reason, more and more European countries and international professional organizations now recommend psychotherapy rather than hormones and surgeries as the first line of treatment for gender-dysphoric youth.

Articles of Interest

Bans on medical care for trans youth are moving quickly through state legislatures

They prohibit treatments such as puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, care that dozens of major U.S. medical groups have endorsed as time tested and medically necessary.

Books: Gender Medicine: the Groundbreaking New Science of Gender-and Sex-Related Diagnosis and Treatment

This book expands on the basic principle that men and women are biologically destined to be different, performing different societal roles as a result of years of evolution. The author is a leading proponent of ‘gender medicine’, tailoring care to the needs of men and women separately.

Doctor, Let’s Talk about Sex … and Gender

A transgender man struggles with how to tell his befuddled doctor that he needs a Pap smear. An out lesbian woman grows impatient with a physician who keeps assuming she must have been subject to sexual abuse as a child. A gay couple bring their sick child to the emergency room only to be asked by the admitting clerk, “Which one of you is the real father?” And a young woman discovers she was born male, with testes, but was surgically sex-changed in infancy because her phallus developed much smaller than the average male’s. These are the kinds of real-world clinical situations that have been motivating medical education experts to revamp American medical school curricula, to improve care for patients who may be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or born with “differences of sex development” (that is, the less common forms of sex development, or what is sometimes called “intersex”).

Doctors Should Include Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation in Medical Records

A patients medical records include all sorts of information. Now some doctors are pushing to add sexual orientation and gender identity.

Experts say leaked messages present false link between gender-affirming care and cancer

Hundreds of messages from an internal chat board for an international group of transgender health professionals were leaked in a think tank report last week and framed as revealing serious health risks associated with gender-affirming care, including cancer. But experts say this correlation is false and oversimplifies the complex role of hormones in the body.

How Often Do People Regret Transitioning?

It’s a complex question, but we do have some data.

Medical Myths About Gender Roles Go Back to Ancient Greece. Women Are Still Paying the Price Today

Gender difference is intimately stitched into the fabric of humanness. At every stage in its long history, medicine has absorbed and enforced socially constructed gender divisions. These divisions have traditionally ascribed power and dominance to men. Historically, women have been subordinated in politics, wealth and education. Modern scientific medicine, as it has evolved over the centuries as a profession, an institution and a discipline, has flourished in these exact conditions. Male dominance—and with it the superiority of the male body—was cemented into medicine’s very foundations, laid down in ancient Greece.

Medicine’s gender revolution: how women stopped being treated as ‘small men’

Until the turn of this century, there was little sense in Western medicine that gender mattered. Outside the niche of female reproductive medicine, the male body was the universal model for anatomy studies. Clinical trials mainly involved males and the results became the evidence base for the diagnosis and treatment of both genders. Medication dosages were typically adjusted for patient size and women were simply “small men”.

Myth #5: All trans people medically transition

Not everyone who is transgender prioritizes or desires procedures, such as hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries, required for a full medical transition. While some undergo medical transitions for cosmetic, psychological, or health reasons, many won’t because they can’t afford it, face some other obstacle, or simply don’t want to.

Redefining Gender

This glossary was prepared in consultation with Eli R. Green of the Center for Human Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania’s Widener University and Luca Maurer of the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Education, Outreach, and Services at New York’s Ithaca College. They are co-authors of the book The Teaching Transgender Toolkit.

Second Thoughts on ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

The American Academy of Pediatrics orders a scientific review. Will it be conducted honestly?

Yet Another Study Shows That Trans and Nonbinary Teens Benefit From Gender-Affirming Care

Policies aimed at banning hormones are at odds with basic human rights and science.