The curious case of the ‘de-sexing’ of clinical language and the Attorney-General
Academic Dr Karleen Gribble explains where the drive to 'de-sex' medical terms is coming from and the potential impacts of it.
The de-sexing of medical language has sparked debate this week, after 180 clinicians and researchers warned the NHMRC of its clinical dangers.
Responding to two NHMRC draft statements* on gender and sex data in research, the group said the trend was positioning women as ‘second-class human beings’ and putting transgender patients at risk of harm.
They cited a US case from The New England Journal of Medicine involving a transgender man with severe lower abdominal pain, where doctors discounted pregnancy as a possibility because his sex was recorded as male in health records.
Hours later, they discovered he was pregnant, but it was too late to stop a prolapsed umbilical cord, leading to fetal death.
