Sex Education and Communication: Why Doctors and Transgender Patients Experience Miscommunication

Abstract

As a result of miscommunications with medical professionals, transgender patients use online forum communities to ask questions about their health. Research has shown that sex education focuses primarily on heterosexual and cis gendered people. There is often no inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community in educational literature, which perpetuates stigma against the community as it others and invalidates them. This study investigates the use of online forums to communicate about problems regarding health and wellness, in consequence of the absence of the LGBTQ+ community from sex education. Six months of posts from two forums on the social networking website Reddit, were collected and analyzed to test this hypothesis. The data was categorized based on the type of post it was, the content of the post, and the responses to the post. It was found that transgender patients, as well as allies and uneducated individuals, utilize these web spaces to teach themselves and each other about information that is absent from education and literature. Discussions of health and wellness were prevalent, but there was a wide variety of posts. These findings along with previous research concludes that there needs to be an increase of sex education and inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community within literature. Further research must be done to figure out how to develop an updated sex education curriculum.