Abstract

In the UK there is a crisis in the provision of healthcare for LGBT people. This is due, in part, by the lack of focused medical, health and social care curricula content about LGBT healthcare generally. Teaching has tended to position heterosexuality and gender normativity—people conforming to social standards of what is ‘appropriate’ feminine and masculine behavior—as the primary context in which health and illness is viewed. Models of health care that promote these views of sexuality and gender identity over others can create an environment in which gender stereotypes and heteronormativity—the cultural bias in favor of opposite-sex over same-sex sexual relationships — result in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people becoming ‘add ins’, if and when they are considered. Even the term LGBT on the rare occasions it figures assumes that Ts have co-extensive healthcare issues as with the Ls, Gs, and Bs, and can be taught together as an extension of the same theme. It is important to respond to the requirements of L, G, B, and T populations accessing health care with different models, not in the form of mainstream tolerance, but, I argue, by changing pedagogical institutions in lasting ways. However, education must not inadvertently pathologize LGBT communities by situating associated medical, health and social care curricula as purely LGBT issues, but must situate pedagogy within a health (in)equity framework that shows how health issues affect LGBT communities in complex ways (Davy & Siriwardena, 2012). As such, this research illustrates how we might overcome the barriers of providing LGBT curricula for medical, health, and social care students in a bid to help ‘mainstream' LGBT people as health citizens.