Our article was published in the journal Patient Education and Counseling

On 10 March 2021, an article was published in the journal Patient Education and Counseling titled “I’m not putting on that floral gown: Enforcement and resistance of gender expectations for transgender people with cancer”.

It reports the results of an institutional study with support from The University of Rochester Medical Center and Cambridge Health Alliance. The research was supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Medical Society. The authors thanked “the participants as well as members of the Transgender Cancer Patient Community Advisory Board”.

The purpose of the study was a qualitative inquiry to “collaborate with transgender people with cancer to generate hypotheses about barriers to oncologic care and methods to eliminate them”.

The paper concludes that expectations regarding patients’ anatomy and gender roles are “enforced with stigmatization and paternalism, both of which reinforce hierarchal relationships between patients and clinicians”. This created “multifactorial and deeply entrenched barriers to the health of transgender patients with cancer”. Only a “resistance to those expectations” provides a path forward.

More excerpts from the paper will be covered in future posts.

A PDF copy for download is also available.