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. 2019 Apr 26;4(1):136-142.
doi: 10.1089/trgh.2018.0058. eCollection 2019.

The Role of the Ethicist in an Interdisciplinary Transgender Health Care Team

Hilary Mabel  1 , Murat Altinay  2 , Cecile A Ferrando  3
Affiliations

The Role of the Ethicist in an Interdisciplinary Transgender Health Care Team

Hilary Mabel et al. Transgend Health. .

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.

Keywords: clinical ethicist; ethics; interdisciplinary team; transgender.

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Conflict of interest statement

Cecile A. Ferrando, MD, MPH receives royalties for the publication C. Ferrando (Unger) and T.N. Thomas, “Transgender surgery: Male to female,” UptoDate (June 4, 2018), https://www.uptodate.com/contents/transgender-surgery-male-to-female. Aspects of this article were presented by Hilary Mabel, JD on behalf of the authors at the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities conference in Kansas City, MO on October 19, 2017.

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