Abstract
Unique ethical issues arise in the provision of gender-affirming care to transgender and gender diverse people. One of the distinctive trends in transgender health care has been the development of interdisciplinary specialty teams with expertise in gender-affirming care. Clinical ethicists can play an important role on these teams in helping gender variant patients and gender-affirming providers navigate complex ethical issues, creating opportunities for enhancing patient experience, and easing provider moral uncertainty. Many opportunities exist for clinical ethicists to lend their skills to this area of clinical care. It is important for interdisciplinary transgender health care teams and other health care professionals providing transgender-specific care to understand the ethical issues involved in such care, the ways in which ethics expertise can be a resource, and the benefits and drawbacks of integrating a clinical ethicist into their team.
Highlights
One of the distinctive trends in transgender health care has been the development of interdisciplinary specialty teams with expertise in gender-affirming care.[1,2,3,4] One such program is our Transgender Surgery & Medicine Program at Cleveland Clinic
Our program has benefitted from expanding the scope of our interdisciplinary team to include an ethicist, as we have found that unique ethical issues can arise in the provision of transgender care
It should be noted that academic bioethicists and clinical ethicists alike continue to make important contributions to advancing queer bioethics, challenging notions of optimal care for transpatients, and uncovering the biases health care professionals may bring to the care of LGBT people.[5,6,7,8]
Summary
One of the distinctive trends in transgender health care has been the development of interdisciplinary specialty teams with expertise in gender-affirming care.[1,2,3,4] One such program is our Transgender Surgery & Medicine Program at Cleveland Clinic. These programs create access to gender-affirming health care providers of different specialties within one institution and provide a gender-affirming space for patients who often face discrimination and stigmatization in the clinical setting. We will describe the opportunities for consistent involvement by ethicists in these teams and present the benefits and risks associated with the embedded ethicist model as it applies to transgender health care
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