To Talk or Not to Talk About Sexual Orientation? That Is the Question: Experiences of Sexual Minority Women With Cancer in Brazil and United Kingdom.

Abstract

This study aims to understand how Brazilian and British sexual minority women who have had cancer make the decision whether or not to disclose their sexual orientation to health professionals. This is a qualitative, interpretative and cross-sectional study. Four Brazilian and three British sexual minority women who were diagnosed with cancer participated in the research. To build the corpus for analysis, individual face-to-face interviews were conducted. The interviews were digitally recorded with the participants' consent, and the audio-recorded content was transcribed verbatim and in full. Subsequently, the data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four main themes were generated: (1) structural aspects of health services; (2) professionals' characteristics; (3) professionals' attitudes/behaviors during appointments; (4) how the topic of sexual orientation (dis)appears at appointments. We found some convergences between the experiences of Brazilian and English sexual minority women. Participants wanted to be able to present with their partner at health services and feel safe that they would be respected and included. Barriers to disclosure included professionals' personal characteristics that might be suggestive of prejudice or lack of understanding, overt political and/or right-wing attitudes, and a feeling that sexual orientation would be ignored by the health provider even if disclosed.