A study investigating brain functions of gender dysphoria at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, has been put on hold after concerns from LGBTQ groups.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders, gender dysphoria is a “marked incongruence between their experienced or expressed gender and the one they were assigned at birth.” Gender Justice LA and the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network released a joint statement, citing major ethical concerns.
Study leader Jamie Feusner, MD, a psychiatrist, told MedPage Today that he has asked UCLA’s Institutional Review Board to “re-review our entire protocol to ensure that it meets all ethics and safety standards.”
He added that his team is “actively engaged with members of the LGBTQ community” to help inform potential adjustments to study protocols. It wasn’t clear whether the entire study is on hold or just enrollment of new participants.
Ezak Perez, executive director of Gender Justice LA, wrote that the “research design unapologetically aims to cause mental health distress to trigger ‘dysphoria’ to an already marginalised and vulnerable community.”
The advocacy groups said that researchers from the Semel Institute reached out to the transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex community in the region to take part in a meeting to help the study design. When they expressed concerns during this meeting and realised the study was already underway with approval from the IRB, leaders from Gender Justice LA and the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network wrote a letter to UCLA’s Office of the Human Research Protection Program.
“The researchers are falsely advertising this study without clarity about the expectations of participants and without consideration of the need for direct access to mental health after care,” wrote Perez and Dannie Cesena, program manager of LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network.
The call for participants was for looking for transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender adults to complete an assessment and one or more MRI scans. Participants would also be “photographed from the neck down while wearing a unitard,” a point of contention cited by Perez in his statement. The enrollment announcement also noted that participants who experience discomfort during this process could withdraw from the study at any point. Requirements included not being psychiatric medications, and that trans and nonbinary participants could not already be on hormone therapy or have had gender-affirming surgery. Participants would be paid a small amount and have expenses reimbursed.
The study in question would use the ‘body morph’ test, designed in 2015 by Feusner and colleagues. During the test, participants are photographed from various angles in a nude-colored, full-body unitard, with faces, hand and feet cropped out.. Participant images are then morphed with pictures of different bodies.
Writing to MedPage Today, Feusner and co-researcher Ivanka Savic-Berglund, MD, PhD, wrote that at the time that Feusner created the ‘body morph’ test, “experiences of body-self incongruence were not easily understood. The test uses images to estimate the degree of alignment between individuals’ body perception and their gender-specific self-identity.”
Perez and Cesena strongly objected to the idea that capturing the neurological response of gender dysphoria through brian imaging could provide any scientific data that could ‘help’ trans people.
“It is suggestive of a search for medical ‘cure,’ which can open the door for more gatekeeping and restrictive policies and practices in relation to access to gender-affirming care,” the letter stated.
Feusner and Savic-Berglund, however, explained that “by demonstrating that body-self incongruence was linked to brain structure and function, we aimed to help provide a biological basis and increase empathy for the life stories of transgender individuals. From the beginning, the aim was to help increase acceptance of transgender individuals.”
Source: MedPage Today
