Simona Giordano

The University of Manchester · Centre for Social Ethics and Policy

Studies suggest that the majority of gender diverse children (up to 84%) revert to the gender congruent with the sex assigned at birth when they reach puberty. These children are now known in the literature as ‘desisters’. Those who continue in the path of gender transition are known as ‘persisters’. Based on the high desistence rates, some advise...

Both clinical literature and biographical accounts suggest that many transgender individuals experience shame or have experienced shame at some point in their life for reasons related to their gender identity. In clinical psychology, at least until the 1960s, shame has not received much attention; focus was on guilt and shame was regarded mainly as...

The need to understand ethical and moral issues in sport is at an all-time high. This latest edition of Ethics in Sport presents readers with the challenges involved when working in the field. This new third edition retains many of the previous editions’ thought provoking pieces, which are still applicable to today’s current issues. These are enhan...

From the moment a child is born, what happens to that child will be heavily based on gender predictions. What usually influences gender predictions is genital morphology. However, endocrinology and developmental psychology show that genital morphology is not always an accurate predictor of gender identity. This chapter reviews some of the recent li...

Studies have highlighted high prevalence of eating disorders among people with gender dysphoria, particularly transgender boys. This finding is extremely important: it means that transgender youth are exposed to the additional health hazards, which are extremely serious, of eating disorders. This paper highlights a series of conceptual problems inh...

A cornerstone in the medical treatment of people who are transgender is that genital surgery should be restricted to adults. We shall shortly illustrate how this clinical advice is incorporated in the major and most authoritative international clinical guidelines on the management of transgenderism. However, as we shall see, there are important mor...

Purpose of review: In June 2015, the newspapers in England once again pointed at the media industry as responsible for the spread of eating disorders. Recent findings: This article reviews this argument and previous research on the role of the media industry in the perpetration of images that may foster eating disorders. Summary: It has been r...

Having contact with each other is one of the most fundamental aspects of the parental-filial relationship. When it comes to this very fundamental aspect of the relationship, an incongruence is apparent: parents have a prima facie right to have contact with their children; children do not have a corresponding right to have contact with their parents...

Objective Recent literature has raised an important ethical concern relating to the way in which surgeons approach people with gender dysphoria (GD): it has been suggested that referring transsexual patients to mental assessment can constitute a form of unjust discrimination. The aim of this paper is to examine some of the ethical issues concernin...

Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is classified as a mental illness and included in the DSM-IV and ICD-10. It will also be included in the DSM-V. The psychiatric diagnosis, in spite of some apparent advantages, has significant psychological and social adverse implications. This paper discusses some of the main epistemological reasons to consider gende...

Purpose: Despite international guidelines being available, not all gender clinics are able to face gender dysphoric (GD) youth population needs specifically. This is particularly true in Italy. Centers offering specialized support are relatively few and a commonly accepted Italian approach to GD youth has still not been defined. The aim of the pre...

There are various treatment approaches available for children and adolescents with gender identity disorder (GID). This chapter offers an overview of these, with a focus on bringing to light their underlying assumption and treatment goals. After such an account, the chapter focuses on the combined approach, which involves early medical treatment fo...

In this paper, we present the case of a couple who refused to disclose the sex of their child to others, and some of the responses that this case prompted in the international media. We outline the ethical issues that this case raises, and we place it into the more general context of parental preferences regarding the gender (development) of their...

This chapter highlights some of the clinical, ethical and legal complexities surrounding the clinical work with eating-disordered clients. It first discusses the potential benefits and risks of coercive treatment, and then focuses on the quandaries present within the English legislation (the relationship between Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) and M...

If one makes a web search for images of anorexia nervosa, one of the most popular vignettes is that of a skinny girl in underwear in front of a mirror, and of the same girl in underwear inside the mirror, who is, however, flabby and big. Yet she is the same girl: The one trapped in the mirror is only the reflection of the girl outside the mirror. M...

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Tony Hope, Jacinta Tan, Anne Stewart, and Ray Fitzpatrick, reporting on twenty-nine interviews they conducted with women with so-called anorexia nervosa, note that the participants recurrently raised issues of authenticity. The paper reflects on the way their behaviors, experiences, and choices can be co...

Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is classified as a mental illness and included in the DSM-IV and ICD-1O. It will also be included in the DSM-V. The psychiatric diagnosis, in spite of some apparent advantages, has significant psychological and social adverse implications. This paper discusses some of the main epistemological reasons to consider gende...

Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is regarded as a mental illness and included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). It will also appear in the DSM-V, due to be published in 2013. The classification of GID as a mental illness is contentious. But what would happen to sufferers if it were removed from the diagnostic manu...

The importance of humanities in the medical curriculum is increasingly recognized. For example, in the United Kingdom, The General Medical Council (GMC), which is an independent body established under the Medical Act 1858 and responsible, among other things, for fostering good medical practice and promoting high standards of medical education, in i...

This paper reflects on some amendments to the Declaration of Helsinki in 2008. It focuses on former paragraphs 5 (now 6) and 19 (now 17). Paragraph 5 suggested that the wellbeing of research participants should take precedence over the interests of science and society. Paragraph 6 now proposes that it should take precedence over all other interests...

Provides ethical and legal guidance for sports and exercise medicine practitioners

Whether anorexics should be allowed to refuse life-saving treatment is an unresolved issue, which raises acrimonious disputes in ethics and law. I verify whether, and if so on what grounds, anorexics’ refusal of treatment should be respected. I use philosophical analytic methods of investigation, combined with discussion of clinical cases and publi...

Transgender children who are not treated for their condition are at high risk of violence and suicide. As a matter of survival, many are willing to take whatever help is available, even if this is offered by illegal sources, and this often traps them into the juvenile criminal system and exposes them to various threats. Endocrinology offers a revol...

The first meeting of the World Congress for Freedom of Scientific Research comes at a particularly difficult time in my life ... Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis does not limit intellectual skills, it makes you fully aware of feelings of despair and fear of lifetime. A time which is violently becoming narrower and which forces me to address the urgenc...

IntroductionAnorexia and the MediaThe Body/Mind Schism: Its OriginsKant and the Mortification of the FleshMoral Integrity and HungerEating Disorders and MoralityTwo Unresolved IssuesIs it Unethical to be Normal Shaped?Conclusions References

In 2002, a child was abandoned in a Burger King restaurant in Amsterdam by a Chinese woman, who hoped that the baby would be picked up by someone able to give the child a better life. She was convicted for child abandonment and imprisoned. Whereas some forms of child abandonment are criminalised, others are socially accepted and not even on the eth...

The ethics of post-mortem organ retention and use is widely debated in bioethics and law. However, the fundamental ethical issues have often been inadequately treated. According to one argument, dead bodies are no longer "persons". Given the great benefits dead bodies offer to human kind, they should be automatically treated as public property: whe...

Understanding Eating Disorders is an original contribution to the field of healthcare ethics. It develops a new theory concerning the moral basis of eating disorders, and places such disorders for the first time at the centre of philosophical discourse. The book explores the relationship that people have with food and their own body by looking at g...

Sport and physical activity is an area that remains relatively unexplored by contemporary bioethics. It is, however, an area in which important ethical issues arise. This paper explores the case of the participation of people with anorexia nervosa in exercise. Exercise is one of the central features of anorexia. The presence of anorexics in exercis...

Eating Disorders, particularly anorexia and bulimia, are of immense contemporary importance and interest. News stories depicting the tragic effects of eating disorders command wide attention. Almost everybody in society has been touched by eating disorders in one way or another, and contemporary obsession with body image and diet fuels fascination...

Imposing artificial feeding on people with anorexia nervosa may be unethical. This seems to be Heather Draper's suggestion in her article, 'Anorexia Nervosa and Respecting a Refusal of Life-Prolonging Therapy: A Limited Justification.' Although this is an important point, I shall show that the arguments supporting this point are flawed. Draper shou...

This paper investigates legal and moral justificationsof coerced treatment for psychiatric patients who aredetained on the grounds that they may harm others.While the general issues concerning compulsorytreatment and detention have been widely canvassed, ithas seldom, if ever, been noticed that the moralreasons that we may have to detain a person w...