Trans*, Gender, Bodies and Sexhormones in Material-Discursive Entanglements
The accessibility to health insurance-funded gender-affirming hormone therapy in Germany is of central importance to many trans* people for their health, safety, and life trajectories. However, the decision about whether they can take hormones through the regular care-system is not in their hands but rather depends on various actors and institutions in the medical, psychotherapeutic, and political sectors. In this presentation, I will draw on my ethnographic and praxeological research experiences to present an outline of a chapter of my dissertation which deals with the tension between barriers to access to hormone therapy and medical self-determination. Against the backdrop of the historically produced onto-epistemological transphobia, I will argue how the diagnosis of ‘transsexuality’, institutionalized since the 1970s, is mobilized by various professions to regulate the binary gender regime in connection with cis-fragile and dysphoric affects towards trans* people. In doing so, I will problematize health insurance services, the undersupply of therapy places, and the ethical practices and reflections of medical professionals to narrate the dynamics of the micro- and macro-politics of trans* care as a precarious moment and as a material-discursive mode of production of trans* bodies and biographies. What movements and initiatives do already exist and are needed to ensure the health of trans* people? What demands for justice can be derived from these insights?
The lecture will take place as part of the World of Contradiction Bremen NatureCultures Lab.