In their first monograph Stef Shuster offers us a bridge between the more thoroughly studied decades of the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary manifestation of transgender medicine in the era of evidence-based medicine. Much has changed since, and indeed many barriers to accessing trans-specific medicine have been lifted. However, some disputes that figure centrally in the US health system remain unresolved and continue to shape how trans people navigate the contemporary biomedical landscape. Shuster offers us a history of the recent past, and in many ways the present, to situate the ongoing turf wars between somatic and mental health clinicians, who have fought over the lives and bodies of trans people seeking any kind of health care, transition related or not. Trans Medicine unfolds in three parts that loosely follow the three sources of data on which Shuster's analyses rely. Through textual analysis of correspondence between Harry Benjamin and colleagues,...
Finding the Familiar in the Strange: Turning the Sociological Imagination onto the Biomedical Gaze in Trans Medicine
Avery R. Everhart is cofounder and a distinguished fellow with the Center for Applied Transgender Studies as well as postdoctoral research fellow in both the School of Information and the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD in population, health, and place from the Spatial Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. Her dissertation bridged informatics, demography, and medical geography and featured the creation of a spatial database of gender-affirming hormone therapy providers, an extrapolation of existing estimates of the size and demographics of the US trans population, and a case study quantifying the accessibility of trans health care in Texas. Beyond the dissertation, Everhart's work appears in a wide range of journals including Social Science and Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Annals of Epidemiology, Open Global Rights, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies.
Avery R. Everhart; Finding the Familiar in the Strange: Turning the Sociological Imagination onto the Biomedical Gaze in Trans Medicine. TSQ 1 November 2022; 9 (4): 682–685. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-10133874
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