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gaywrites:

Dr. Una Coales, a senior member of the Royal College of General Practitioners in the U.K., is under investigation after writing a guide suggesting LGBT medical students tone down “overtly gay” behaviors in order to pass their exams. 

Coales has responded to the controversy by saying that the guide was not meant to suggest anyone change who they are, but instead to offer realistic advice relating to how examiners may show subjective bias against minority candidates. She offered the following guidance for LGBT students and others who fall outside the mainstream:

In one passage of the guide, Dr. Una Coales’s MRCGP CSA Book, she writes: “One candidate was facing a third sitting and yet no one had told him that his mannerisms, gait and speech were too overtly gay, and that he was sitting an exam administered by a right-wing conservative Royal College.

“So I advised him to lower and deepen his high-pitched voice and neutralise his body movements. He went back to his surgery, practised his speech until his voice went hoarse and modified his body language. Not only did he pass his exam, but he informed me he noticed a huge difference in the way patients interacted with him.”

She also advises candidates such as Nigerian and Asian trainees to “focus on emphasising the lyrical Scottish or Welsh accent” if sitting exams in these regions. Female candidates should not wear a floral dress as “if you dress like a nurse they [patients] have difficulty believing they are seeing ‘the doctor’…” Male students should “shave off” facial hair as it can project an “unclean, deceitful” image, she adds, in a chapter originally published in a medical magazine in 2009. Meanwhile, she advises overweight students to “project an image of Santa Claus. Put your hands on top of your protuberant abdomen, with your fingers interlocking but open.”

Holy crap, this baffles me. I think I might be even more offended by the Santa Claus comment than anything else. Seriously?