Researchers ask how gender-diverse people feel about donating their bodies to science
CBC
Researchers at Western University want to understand what sex- and gender-diverse people think about donating their bodies to science—information they say will help future healthcare professionals respect their patients' identities.
The study, titled Embodied Legacies: Perspectives on Body Bequeathal from Sex and Gender Diverse Individuals, is part of a research project by Clinical Anatomy master’s student Charlie Brake.
Donating one's body to be used as a cadaver in an anatomy lab is called body bequeathal in the science world.
People bequeath their bodies for a number of reasons, but donations often stem from a desire to give back, said Charys Martin, who teaches anatomy and sits on the board of the body bequeathal program at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry.
She is also the supervisor for Brake’s research project.
There are also many reasons why people may not want to donate their bodies after death. For example, when religion or culture explicitly state what should happen to the body, or historical injustice and mistrust toward the medical community.
But in the past, when data has been collected to show which demographics donate their bodies, there has been no distinction between biological sex and gender, researchers say.
“When we think about transgender and non-binary, potentially intersex people, we don't actually have any information about whether or not they donate their bodies to science, or the best way to respect their bodies and their memory,” Brake said.
The study is asking sex- and gender-diverse individuals to sit for a one-hour interview with Brake to share their thoughts and opinions on it.
The goal of the study is not to “recruit” donors from that community, Brake said, but rather to help improve the equity, diversity and inclusion of lab practices in case there are sex and gender diverse donors. Making anatomical education programs more integrative of the “complex relationship that can exist between someone’s identity and someone’s body” is also important, Brake said.
“We're not going into it with an expectation of what we're looking to find, because this is really the first that we are aware of that somebody is making this kind of inquiry,” he said. “It's really more exploratory in nature.”
By bringing in voices of people with different lived experiences, Brake and Martin are hoping this research can help normalize the fact that everybody—and every body—is different.
“Each individual is in fact an individual,” Martin said. “That's the way we want our healthcare professionals to go out and treat their patients, and that's how we want all of our students to treat their individual donors in the anatomy lab, as well.”
Cadavers are the students’ first patients, and their best teachers, Martin said.
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