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Queer theory is a disruptive lens that can be adopted by researchers, educators, clinicians, and administrators to effect transformative social change. It offers opportunities for anesthesiologists, critical care physicians, and medical practitioners to more broadly understand what it means to think queerly and how queering anesthesiology and critical care medicine spaces improves workplace culture and patient outcomes. This article grapples with the cis-heteronormative medical gaze and queer people's apprehensions of violence in medical settings to offer new ways of thinking about structural changes needed in medicine, medical language, and the dehumanizing application of medical modes of care. Using a series of clinical vignettes, this article outlines the historical context underlying queer peoples' distrust of medicine, a primer in queer theory, and an understanding of how to begin to "queer" medical spaces using this critical framework., (© 2023. Canadian Anesthesiologists' Society.)

Purpose: Females remain under-represented in academic anesthesiology. Our objectives were to investigate gender differences over time in the first and last authors of published articles as well as corresponding citation rates in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia (CJA)., Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional, retrospective analysis of first and last authors' gender from editorials and original articles published in the CJA in a sample of one calendar year of each decade between 1954 to 2017. We analyzed the relationships between author gender, year of publication, article type, and number of citations., Results: Out of 639 articles identified, 542 (85%) were original investigations and 97 (15%) were editorials. Where gender could be confidently identified, the majority (461/571, 81%) of first authors were male. Although there was an increase in the proportion of female first authors over time, this increase was outpaced by the overall increase in female anesthesiologists in Canada. Original articles received more citations and were more likely to have a female first author than editorial articles were. An original article with a female first author resulted in 0.34 (95% confidence interval, 0.28 to 0.39; P < 0.001) more citations per article than a male first author when adjusting for year of publication., Conclusions: Our study shows that, despite a slow increase over time, female authors are under-represented relative to male authors in the CJA and relative to the changing demographics of anesthesiologists in Canada. The reasons for this disparity are multifactorial and further research is needed to identify effective solutions.

Accumulating evidence supports an effect of physician gender (or sex, a surrogate used in many studies) on important patient outcomes such as death, complications, and hospital length of stay. Recent studies suggest that these effects result from the gender diversity of the team rather than individual physician gender. Here, we reflect on the potential mechanisms of an effect of physician gender on patient outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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