Setting a research agenda in trans health: An expert assessment of priorities and issues by trans and nonbinary researchers

Abstract

Background:

This article is by a group of trans and nonbinary researchers and experts in the field of trans health who have conducted an analysis of trans health research needs.

Aims:

To highlight topics that need further research and to outline key considerations for those conducting research in our field.

Methods:

The first author conducted semi-structured interviews with all coauthors, and these were used to create a first draft of this manuscript. This draft was circulated to all authors, with edits made until consensus was reached among the authors.

Results:

More comprehensive long-term research that centers trans people’s experiences is needed on the risks and benefits of gender affirming hormones and surgeries. The trans health research field also needs to have a broader focus beyond medical transition or gender affirmation, including general health and routine healthcare; trans people’s lives without, before, and after medical gender affirmation; and sexuality, fertility, and reproductive healthcare needs. More research is also needed on social determinants of health, including ways to make healthcare settings and other environments safer and more supportive; social and legal gender recognition; the needs of trans people who are most marginalized; and the ways in which healing happens within trans communities. The second part of this article highlights key considerations for researchers, the foremost being acknowledging trans community expertise and centering trans community members’ input into research design and interpretation of findings, in advisory and/or researcher roles. Ethical considerations include maximizing benefits and minimizing harms (beneficence) and transparency and accountability to trans communities. Finally, we note the importance of conferences, grant funding, working with students, and multidisciplinary teams.

Discussion:

This article outlines topics and issues needing further consideration to make the field of trans health research more responsive to the needs of trans people. This work is limited by our authorship group being mostly White, all being Anglophone, and residing in the Global North.

Keywords:

• Trans health
• gender affirming healthcare
• social determinants of health
• ethics

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Hastings et al. (2021, p. e186) defined this as “the assumptions that endosex (someone whose sex characteristics are expected for the male or female sex, ie, someone who is not intersex), cisgender, and heterosexuality are ‘normal’”.

2 We thank an anonymous reviewer for alerting us to this point.

3 We use the term awareness and humility here because it broadly encompasses accountability, power differentials between providers and service users and acknowledges systemic inequities (Fisher-Borne et al., 2015; Tervalon & Murray-García, 1998), although not all authors agreed with this terminology.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Waikato Medical Research Foundation (grant no. 301).