Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Gender diverse people, or more commonly transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people, may be at risk of receiving worse cancer care and having worse outcomes when compared to other groups. Although there is some research supporting this belief, it is difficult to identify gender diverse people in data that are regularly used for cancer research. Without this information, leaders and health care providers cannot make helpful changes to their organizations or to how they provide cancer care. The goal of this project is to create a guide for researchers to help them understand what gender diversity means and different ways they can include it in their own projects. The first part of this project will explore ways gender is included in other cancer research. The information gathered in this step will be used to guide conversations with gender diverse people to find out what they think is important for other researchers to know about gender diversity and how researchers should be including them in their projects. Based on these conversations and what is currently done in other research, I will see if gender is being included the way it should be in the data often used in cancer research. I will combine the results from all of these steps to create a guide for researchers. Creating this guide will allow gender diverse people to say, in their own terms, how they want to be included in cancer research. Ultimately, this guide will help us better understand the challenges gender diverse people face through their cancer journey. It will also help decision-makers make changes so that gender diverse people receive the best possible care.