Creation and Evaluation of the Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation (GSSO) Ontology

Nearly 17% of LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, agender/asexual, and other umbrella gender/sexual identity minorities) persons report avoiding medical care due to discrimination, with 33% of transgender persons experiencing significant problems with medical providers. These problems are often connected to inappropriate or offensive language resulting in LGBTQIA+ persons feeling uneasy or unable to trust providers. Providers are often not trained in appropriate language use for LGBTQIA+ persons. In medicine, language is modeled using controlled vocabularies or ontologies. Ontologies are common, shared networks which explain information in a domain. Our objective was to create and evaluate an ontology system and resource guide which leveraged LGBTQIA+ terminology …