Please don't gayify!: an autoethnographic account of medicalised relationality for LGBTQI+ safe affirming medical health education and clinical practice

TL;DR

This paper explores how LGBTQI+ individuals experience medical education and clinical practice, highlighting biases and the need for inclusive care.

Contribution

The paper contributes an autoethnographic account that critiques the medical model's handling of LGBTQI+ health and education.

Findings

Health professionals often lack knowledge about LGBTQI+ communities, leading to unconscious bias.

Medical training fails to adequately address the specific needs of LGBTQI+ individuals.

The authors highlight how medical interactions can reduce LGBTQI+ people to medical prognoses.

Abstract

In this article, the authors, a cis-gender gay man and an Indigenous non-binary, two-spirit person, narrate their past encounters with health professionals and their experiences pursuing allied health care training as students. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the first author re-narrates how medical practitioners and students engage (or fail to engage) with the LGBTQIA+ community. They draw on gray documentation derived from an interaction with a consulting physician that highlighted a telling lack of knowledge about the LGBTQ+ community, including those with diverse sex characteristics and sexualities/manifesting as unconscious bias. This interaction provided the impetus to speak back to the experience of being reduced to a medical prognosis. The second author questions the hegemonic practices underpinning encounters with the medical model of response in tertiary education. Our remit in this paper is to question how adequately the specific needs of the LGBTQI+ population are being addressed by the medical model and to what extent aspiring clinicians understand how their actions can contribute to gender- and sexuality-based discrimination and stigmatization.