Ethical issues arising in the provision of medical interventions for gender diverse children and adolescents

Abstract

The care of children and adolescents whose experience of the body is at odds with their gender feelings raises a number of questions that are as much ethical as medical or psychological. In this article I highlight some areas of ethical concern from the point of view of a senior clinician at the nationally commissioned UK Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). I make the assumption that ethical deliberation is relational and grounded in the natural, social, political and institutional worlds in which the ethical questions arise. I try to show how matters of empirical fact, alongside an appreciation of broad social contexts, and historic and current power relations, provide an essential framework for the ways that ethical choices are framed by key groups of people as they take up different, sometimes opposing, ethical positions. I argue that practising ethically in such a service is not helpfully reduced to a single event, a treatment decision aimed at achieving the morally ‘right’ outcome, but an extended process in time. In the charged debate surrounding the recognition of these young people’s needs, we must do more to promote responsible debate about the scope of sound ethical practice.