Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine

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Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape

Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology moves across the Americas to show how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization.

In New York, Christoph Hanssmann examines activist attempts to overturn bans on using public health dollars to fund trans- health care. In Argentina, he traces how trans- activists marshaled medical statistics and personal biographies to reveal state violence directed against trans- people and travestis. Hanssmann also demonstrates the importance of understanding transphobia in the broader context of gendered racism, ableism, and antipoverty, arguing for the rise of a thoroughly coalition-based mass mobilization.

Care without Pathology highlights the distributive arguments activists made to access state funding for health care, combating state arguments that funding trans- health care is too specialized, too expensive, and too controversial. Hanssmann situates trans- health as a crucible within which sweeping changes are taking placewith potentially far-reaching effects on the economic and racial barriers to accessing care.

Reviews

"A bold ethnography of twenty-first century trans health care movements in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology untangles the thicket of political distortion to reveal the urgency and innovation of championing trans health care as a public good and a social need. A vital book for grasping a revolutionary movement that propagates access to care and justice."Nayan Shah, University of Southern California

Author Bio

Christoph Hanssmann is assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Womens Studies at the University of California, Davis.