Endocrine Abstracts

Transphobia is expressed as negative attitudes, emotions and actions towards transgender individuals or transsexualism. The aim of this study is to investigate the existence of transphobic approaches towards transgender individuals in physicians in different clinics that play an active role in the gender transition process. It was planned to include physicians from the disciplines of psychiatry, endocrinology, gynecology, urology and plastic surgery. A questionnaire was sent to these physicians via internet and the participants were asked to answer ‘‘the Genderism and Transphobia Scale’’ and sociodemographic questions such as academic title, type of institution, age, gender, place of birth and residence, marital status, sexual orientation and religious belief. Also, no names and surnames were requested from these people. Increased scale scoreshows the presence of higher transphobia. The number of physicians who completed the study on the internet was 455. The mean age was 37.03 ± 9.59 years. The male to female ratio was 1.12. Of the participants, 23 (27%) were psychiatrists, 107 (23.5%) were endocrinologists, 93 (20.4%) were gynecologists, 88 (19.3%) were urologists and 44 (9.7%) were plastic surgeon. 203 (44.6%) of the participants defined themselves as belong to a religion, 106 (23.3%) as deist, 91 (20%) as religious and 55 as atheist. And, 94.9% of the participants were heterosexual. According to disciplines, there was a significant difference between groups in term of the mean total scores of transphobia scale (P < 0.001). In the post-hoc analysis to understand the reason for the difference, scale scores of psychiatrists were significantly lower than endocrinologists, plastic surgeons, and urologists, and did not differ from gynecologists. Morever, we found that urologists’ scale scores were significantly higher than gynecologists. When the participants were categorized according to their religious self-definition; the mean total scores of scale were significantly different between groups (P < 0.001). While the mean scores of those who define themselves as atheists and deists were lower than those who belong to a religion and religious, Psychiatrists are in an important role in the psychotherapy process, which is used to diagnose transgender individuals and to cope with the difficulties these individuals experience in society and in the gender transition process. For this reason, it can be thought that psychiatrists show less transphobic approaches than other disciplines. This study shows that transphobia may be at different levels according to the discipline of physicians and there may be differences as a result of individual characteristics.