There are several doctors on this list who might find this gay doctor's description of the prejudices he's encountered in his profession familiar and depressing reading: http://www.towleroad.com/2012/04/a-brief-examination-of-homophobia-in-medicine.html
http://towleroad.typepad.com/files/schuster_speech.pdf Many young queer medical students and doctors have told me how hard it is to be out in such a hierarchical profession, where older and less tolerant members continue to be influential long after they might have retired in other professions. One of my own most depressing experiences was soon after the Delhi High Court verdict when I was asked to speak to a session of the Bombay Psychiatric Association on the verdict. In the front row were all the older members and they constituted a complete rock wall of refusal to listen to what I was saying. Their essential feelings seemed to be (a) you aren't a doctor (lets leave aside jokes about my surname here) so we're not going to listen to you, and (b) you may be OK being gay, good for you, but we have always treated people who come to us wanting to "change" their homosexuality and we will continue to do so. It was truly depressing, and the only saving grace was that in the tea break several younger members of the audience did come up to me and said they appreciated what I was saying, but they didn't seem able to express this in front of their seniors. So I guess change will come, and the writer of this piece records how it has started to come in the US, but it will take time. Of course, for all the negative stories one hears, there are many remarkable ones - for example, the case of the trans woman I met recently who is studying in a prestigious medical institution and has started transitioning with the full knowledge and support of the head of her department. And many doctors help queer people in ways that go well beyond their basic professional duty. One can only hope that its the voices of such doctors that will prevail over time. Most of the experiences the writer of this piece records weren't directed at him, because he wasn't open about his sexuality, and who can blame him when there were experiences like this: "A year later I was doing my rotations. On my adult neurology rotation, a young woman came to the emergency ward with urinary incontinence and other symptoms and signs of a herniated disc.Themyelogramconfirmed the diagnosis. The neurosurgeonwas eager to operate.The neurology team was delighted that she was a great teaching case. But she proved a richer teaching case than we anticipated. The neurosurgeon abruptly canceled the operation. It turned out that the radiologist had reversed his reading. When pressed as to why he no longer saw what even a third-year medical student could see (that would be me), he confessed that the neurosurgeon had pressured him to change his read. When our team met with the neurosurgeon, he was direct. He had seen what he assumed to be a lesbian novel at the patient’s bedside, and he wasn’t going to operate. His rationalization was that she might have inserted something into her urethra that caused her incontinence. He had no research or case studies to support his theory. He had no explanation for why a lesbian would do this. He had no explanation for why it wasn’t showing up on x-ray. He made it clear, though, that he wasn’t going to operate on a lesbian. "Then I heard a voice shout, “So, she’s a lesbian, what does it matter!” And then I realized that the voice was mine. There was a moment of silence as everyone turned to look at me, jaws agape. The neurosurgeon burst forth with questions. How do you know? Did she tell you? What did she say? Indeed, she hadn’t said anything. It was just that she and the woman by her side during all of this were the most obviously devoted couple I’d met in any of my rotations yet. The neurosurgeon held firm. To their credit, the neurology team got orthopedics to perform the surgery."
