Empowering a student with anatomical provides more than just a framework for further health related studies. Many of our students never go on to a career that relies on anatomy knowledge. Helping an individual to understand how their body works, how they function, has lifelong importance to how they understand their own health, and that of those around them. 

However, in my anatomy teaching, I also recognize the opportunity to help students understand anatomical differences between individuals, and how this can shape who we are. 

It starts with treating each of our body donors as individuals in class, discussing them as individuals and discussing the differences between them. Helping a student to relate to our body donors and not dissociate from their identity as a "specimen" or "learning resources" is important for many reasons including establishing humanistic values and helping to correlate anatomical variations with the individuality of each of us. 

This individuality is exemplified in how I teach the reproductive systems. I start with addressing the concepts of sex, gender, and sexual identity, and then discuss the non-binary and non-static nature of these. The male and female reproductive systems I present as the two extreme ends of the scale for which these structures exist. The resources I have integrated into my teaching help students understand the development of these structures, and like every other area of our body, the differences that are created. 

The most powerful feedback I received came not from a student, but one of my teaching team who heard about the contextual framework that I had been using:

“Firstly, I want to say that this is a much more integrated way to teach the urogenital system and anatomically and scientifically makes more sense regarding the structural, functional and developmental aspects of the genitalia. Secondly I want to say thank you, as a gender diverse person. Having been raised and educated within a binary mindset of male vs female this system has always been an issue for me and a fuel for the psychosocial aspects of being transgender. This change in the curriculum of this topic in anatomy serves as a form of representation and education of gender and sex diversity and it is incredibly affirmative for people who fall within this spectrum. This is a revolutionary change and I am so proud to be a part of this department that not only recognizes the need to change but also takes the time and effort to transform this system. Your efforts will ripple through not just on an academic level but on a social level and will create a new generation of change. Thank you again.”

It is a humbling experience as an educator to think of the impact that you have beyond the classroom and that potentially you have helped shape who they understand themselves to be as a person, who they want to be, and what they can achieve.