The Othering of Patients

Recorded:
Feb 2024
Speaker
Dr. Jenna Beckham
Duration
00:01:12
AUDIO CLIP
TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Jenna Beckham: I think there are other people who are making these decisions who, maybe it’s naive, but I’d like to try to think they’re not evil or ill intended at heart. But I think there’s an “othering” nature of it; a sort of, they’re different, the people who are seeking gender-affirming care and the people who are getting abortions. At least there’s a concept of that, that those, quote unquote, types of people, are different than the people who are holding office and are in power. And so I think, again, a lot of these people are lacking that human component to it. They may not know a transgender individual. They probably know someone who’s had an abortion because we know the statistics of how frequent it is. But in some ways, as we hear politicians who have been sort of exposed of their partners, their spouses, their children having abortions, they sort of justify it in some way. Those examples or those instances are different than sort of this picture they try to paint of who are the people who are getting abortions and why they’re making sort of social, moral decisions that they view as poor or inferior to their own choices.

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