A 61-year-old man is speaking out after he found out that his doctor described him as a “homosexual patient” in a medical report.

“I feel humiliated and discriminated against,” Enzo Speranzini Anelli said about the incident.

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Speranzini Anelli went to the Santo Spirito hospital in Pescara, Italy, with his husband last Friday, and he said that the doctor who treated him seemed “very distant” and it made him “uncomfortable.”

“When she was typing the report, she said aloud: ‘I’m noting homosexual patient,'” Anelli later told Il Messaggero, as reported by La Repubblica.

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Speranzini Anelli said that he’s now worried that the report will be kept by the Local Health Authority for future reference.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I expected anything but to experience it in a hospital.”

Department Director Giustino Parruti stated that no one without access will be able to view the report.

University of Rome infectious diseases professor Massimo Andreoni explained that Speranzini Anelli’s sexual orientation “has no utility” in the report.

“We can discuss risky sexual behavior if the information is relevant to treatment, but without making a distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals,” he said, adding that sometimes data about sexual orientation is collected anonymously “for statistical purposes” about certain infectious diseases.

The Pescara Local Health Authority has issued a statement in response to the incident.

“There was no violation of the patient’s privacy,” the statement said. “The contested wording appears exclusively in the initial outpatient visit report, a strictly personal document given solely to the interested party, as would have been the case for a heterosexual patient, without any distinction. This notation is not present in either the admission documents or the internal day hospital admission documentation, used for access to care and for communication between departments.”

The statement says that “consent for this disclosure, in the presence of witnesses, was explicitly requested and obtained” from the patient to include the information.

Italy does not recognize same-sex couples’ marriages, but discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment is banned in the country. Similar protections do not exist for trans people, but a court ruled in 2023 that anti-trans discrimination is a form of sex-based discrimination.

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