“A quality of heart, of presence, and of really caring”: toward affirmative intersex health communication in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: This qualitative research study aimed to better understand and help improve the Canadian context for health communication with intersex adults by centering the voices of those directly involved and impacted. Methods: We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with intersex individuals (14) and healthcare practitioners (HCPs, 8) from diverse areas of care. Interviews were analyzed via template thematic analysis and filtered through a conceptual lens that brought together agency-based and social-ecological models of health communication. Results: Findings produced three interlocking axes for change: HCP skills and approaches, structural access to care, and norms and discourses. Participant accounts depict a landscape for intersex health communication where practices are improving, but adverse experiences are still commonplace and intersex individuals cannot assume HCPs will be competent in intersex care. Rather, they utilize a variety of strategies and expend considerable efforts navigating structural gaps and barriers to access affirmative HCPs, who themselves often gained their expertise via individual initiative. Interviewees advocated for HCPs to get a baseline background in intersex care during their medical training, as well as skills in accessible health communication and person-centered and trauma-informed approaches. They also connected broader societal stigma and pathologization to harmful medical practices and called for naturalization and normalization of intersex variations. Conclusion: This study highlights the need for collaborative efforts across multiple sectors and by multiple stakeholders to drive meaningful change. Findings can help guide HCPs, medical educators, researchers, advocates, and policymakers towards accessible, affirmative, and agency-based care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".