Thanks for this reply, Chris. That is very interesting and disturbing. The fact that people jumped immediately to a biological explanation, despite the fact that differential treatment by gender is well documented, and that there were differences in transplantation - is very telling about how pervasive and automatic the attribution to biology can be. We will talk more about health care disparities (differences in how people are treated by sociodemographic characteristics despite equivalence clinical need and access to care) in the lecture in two weeks.
I think your points about how structures interact with the ability to access transplantation are so important - and I find your hypothesis about being less likely to ask for living donors to be very interesting and worth exploring.