Diagnosing Wellness: Relations of Care in Feminist and Trans Health Politics and Practices

• In Event: 516 - Section on Medical Sociology Paper Session. Health, Biomedicine and Social Movements

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of transgender health as a field that has been eminently shaped by social movement activism. Focusing on empirical data from an ethnographic study of trans health care providers and social movement activists in New York City and Buenos Aires, it explores two major themes relevant to medical sociology and its intersection with science, technology, and medicine studies (ST&MS): 1) processes of depathologization, and 2) transformations of biomedical expertise and authority. Drawing from interviews and participant observation, the paper explores connections (tense and otherwise) between trans health and feminist health, and explores their intertwined engagements with a politics of care. It describes how activists and “insider-providers” in both sites collaborate to establish broad access to care for trans patients without defining gender non-normativity through illness or disorder. Relatedly, the paper examines how providers and activists in the U.S. and Argentina maintain geographically distinct relations to the practice and value of diagnoses as a means of enabling care. As such, this investigation of trans health practices extends the medicalization-based critiques of biomedicine that form the cornerstone of scholarship in transgender studies. It also contributes to sociological and ST&MS engagements with medicalization as they relate to the study of social movements by elaborating on the relations between depathologization, diagnosis, and the stratification of care.

Author

• Christoph Hanssmann, UCSF