Everywhere and nowhere simultaneously: The ‘absent presence’ of sexuality in medical education

Abstract

A comprehensive history of medical sex education in the USA is missing from the literature, and much of the recent literature on sexuality education within medical training in the USA relies on survey research, which reveals little about the nature and content of medical sex education, and the meanings of sexuality that are produced and transmitted within it. In this article I provide a brief historical overview of medical sex education in the USA to provide context for my ethnographic study of the ways in which sexuality education was conceptualized and executed at a top-twenty American medical school. Although faculty members at this medical school believed that sexuality was important to medical practice and thus important to teach about within medical education, teachings about sexuality were fragmented and did not produce a consistent set of messages about what sexuality means or how it might matter to medical practice. I show how formal knowledge about sexuality has been and continues to be as elusive within medical education as anywhere else, and discuss historical continuities in the perceived barriers to providing medical sex education. In addition to increasing our understanding of how medical knowledge about sexuality is produced and transmitted, this research expands the study of sex education beyond contexts in which its intended purpose is to influence the personal behavior of its subjects.

Knowledge Retention and Clinical Skills Acquisition in Sexual and Gender Minority Health Curricula: A Systematic Review

“…Sexual and gender minoritized (SGM) individuals and individuals born with a difference in sex development (DSD) experience ongoing health inequities that are, in part, caused by intersecting systems of oppression embedded in health care and medical education. [1][2][3][4][5][6] Despite decades of social changes and developments to include medical education content on people who are SGM and/or born with DSDs, 7 in 2011, a landmark national survey found that medical schools across the United States had few to no content hours on SGM/ DSD medical education. 8 At the time, common barriers to implementing medical education curricula on SGM/ DSD health care included uncertainty of what content to teach and where to include it in the existing curriculum, absence of trained faculty to teach, and lack of resources to teach the content well.…”

Adaptation and Validation of the Indonesian Version of Attitudes toward Sexuality Questionnaire in Individuals with Intellectual Disability (ASQ-ID)

“…However, in fact, sexuality has never been taught in many medical schools. In general, there is reproduction in the medical curriculum but not sexual attitudes [24]. Thus, the attitude towards sex should be included as a specific subject of sexual education or part of reproduction [23,24].…”

Entre la Coacción y el Consentimiento: Un Estudio sobre la Violencia Sexual Masculina en las Relaciones de Pareja Heterosexuales

“…Some authors attribute this lack of exploration and research to insufficient training for professionals working with women who have experienced gender violence, in areas such as primary care (Murphy, 2019), education services (Sanabria & Murray, 2018) and national security services and the armed forces (López-Ossorio et al 2018;Menéndez, Pérez & Lorence, 2013), and the limited academic education available in the field of sexuality (Chen & Barrington, 2017). This lack of exploration is striking given that forced sexual activity is a risk factor associated with manslaughter and murder (López-Ossorio et al 2018;Martínez-Sanz, Mañas-Viejo, & Pons-Salvador, 2016).…”