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Researchers at Western University want to understand what sex- and gender-diverse people think about donating their bodies to science—information they say will help future healthcare professionals respect their patients’ identities.
The study, titled Embodied Legacies: Perspectives on Body Bequeathal from Sex and Gender Diverse Individuals, is part of a research project by Clinical Anatomy master’s student Charlie Brake.
Donating one’s body to be used as a cadaver in an anatomy lab is called body bequeathal in the science world.
People bequeath their bodies for a number of reasons, but donations often stem from a desire to give back, said Charys Martin, who teaches anatomy and sits on the board of the body bequeathal program at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry.
She is also the supervisor for Brake’s research project.
There are also many reasons why people may not want to donate their bodies after death. For example, when religion or culture explicitly state what should happen to the body, or historical injustice and mistrust toward the medical community.
But in the past, when data has been collected to show which demographics donate their bodies, there has been no distinction between biological sex and gender, researchers say.
“When we think about transgender and non-binary, potentially intersex people, we don’t actually have any information about whether or not they donate their bodies to science, or the best way to respect their bodies and their memory,” Brake said.
The study is asking sex- and gender-diverse individuals to sit for a one-hour interview with Brake to share their thoughts and opinions on it.
The goal of the study is not to “recruit” donors from that community, Brake said, but rather to help improve the equity, diversity and inclusion of lab practices in case there are sex and gender diverse donors. Making anatomical education programs more integrative of the “complex relationship that can exist between someone’s identity and someone’s body” is also important, Brake said.
“We’re not going into it with an expectation of what we’re looking to find, because this is really the first that we are aware of that somebody is making this kind of inquiry,” he said. “It’s really more exploratory in nature.”
A student’s first patient
By bringing in voices of people with different lived experiences, Brake and Martin are hoping this research can help normalize the fact that everybody—and every body—is different.
“Each individual is in fact an individual,” Martin said. “That’s the way we want our healthcare professionals to go out and treat their patients, and that’s how we want all of our students to treat their individual donors in the anatomy lab, as well.”
Cadavers are the students’ first patients, and their best teachers, Martin said.
Among the skills students learn in cadaveric anatomy is interpersonal professionalism, and by listening to and respecting the wishes of potential sex and gender diverse donors, students can hone a more practiced toolkit to help them treat patients with diverse identities more inclusively, Brake said.
“I hope that this sparks a conversation around how we can make our healthcare professional students feel comfortable with treating everybody with respect and humility and with a person-based lens,” he said.
The body bequeathal program
Donations to Western’s body bequeathal program fluctuate year to year, with the program generally accepting 65 to 85 bodies annually.
As far as the program is aware, one donor has identified as part of the gender-diverse community, Martin said.
The board had already made strides to improve lab inclusivity, she added. Rather than assuming the gender of a donor based on anatomy, identity pronouns are now collected from the family at the time of donation, allowing students to use the donor’s lived identity when speaking about them in the lab.
“At the end of the day, that is a small thing that we can do to ensure that somebody’s full life and memory is honored in their virtuous decision to allow us to learn from their body,” she said.