Healthy bodies, unhealthy medicine: How proponents of anti-trans healthcare bans imagine children’s futures

• In Event: Constructing the "Healthy" Child

Abstract

Modern children and childhood are characterized by risk, and contemporary biomedicalization provides tools and techniques for identifying and managing risks to health. Concurrently, the actors who speak on matters of health have diversified and proliferated outside of traditional medical realms, and political actors are routinely making authoritative claims and decisions about the nature of health, illness, and treatment. Because gender is increasingly discussed in terms of health, this paper examines how proponents of state-level policies that seek to limit access to transition-related healthcare construct children’s health and what kinds of futures are imagined as favorable and ideal or unimaginable and preventable. Using text from thirty bills that passed state legislatures and over four hours of congressional proceedings from Arkansas’s HB1570, this paper presents preliminary findings on how trans medicine ban proponents construct the “healthy” child and the role of medicine vis-à-vis sex and gender. Preliminary analysis suggests contemporary risk discourses implicitly construct trans medicine, and by extension trans children, as a threat to children and the population as a whole, even as these policies are discussed by proponents in terms of “protecting children.”

Author

• Katherine Alexander, Rice University