Informed Consent and Movie

It’s very evident that judging others is a part of human nature. We all have done it. Transamerica is a movie that deals with a man by the name of Stanley who faces many obstacles on his journey as a transsexual. The movie specifically shows how much difficulty a person who is interested in getting a male-to-female sexual reassignment surgery faces. Not only this, there are many medical ethics related concepts that go hand in hand with this particular movie. Let’s start with our first concept known as truth telling. According to http://missinglink.uscf.edu, truth telling is defined as “the avoidance of lying, deception, misrepresentation, and non-disclosure in interactions with patients or relevant to patient care”. Transamerica had a lot of scenes that violated this concept. For example, in the beginning of the movie Stanly (also later known as Bree) has a conversation with his therapist who asks him about his family. He replied “I don’t have family, they are dead”. In this scene he was lying because he was not close to his parents due to the fact that he was not sure if they would accept his sexual orientation. There were other scenes as well where Stanley could not help but lie to his son about who he really was. His son assumed he was a female by the name of Bree...but this only lasted for so long until he found out the truth. All these scenes violated the medical ethics concept known as truth telling in my opinion. The next concept I noticed in the movie is paternalism. According to ascensionhealth.org, paternalism is defined as “the context of healthcare is constituted by any action, decision, rule, or policy made by a physician or other care-giver, or a government, that dictated what is best of the patient(s) without considering the patient’s own belief and value system and does not respect patient autonomy. In this movie there was a scene where Stanley hands his consent form asking his therapist for a signature. His therapist, Margret, would not