UC Santa Cruz

Transition medicine has developed significantly within the last hundred years, with much of it originating out of Eastern Europe and Asia. With its import into the United States, the state’s interest in managing this medicine has also grown. My project argues that as transition medicine has grown, it has increasingly aligned with normalizing processes that closely surveil and control how it is accessed by transgender people. Using transgender memoirs and first person accounts available through the Digital Transgender Archive (a virtual archive holding a broad collection of materials relating to queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming life largely from the last one hundred and fifty years), my first chapter begins with a history of transgender medicine alongside developing state investments in medical transition, comparing two state-sanctioned transitions in Great Britain and present-day Latvia. The chapter compares historical legacies of state investment in transgender medicine that conflict with the otherwise homophobic and transphobic policies they enact. In my second chapter, I argue that these histories inform current research methods through an analysis of transgender medical conferences. Based on research I conducted while attending a variety of conferences between 2019-2020, I assess how medicine continues to align itself with the state to construct “healthy” transitions (those that successfully construct normatively gendered citizen subjects) while pathologizing transitions that are unable to become normatively gendered, i.e. trans people of color and/or non-cis-passing trans people. My final chapter turns to medical and surgical advertisements for transition medicine and connects the histories of medicine with the modern discourse of transition care through an analysis of the sale of transgender medicine. I explore how medicine works in conjunction with capitalism, producing a trans-embodiment that can be bought and sold. I end the dissertation by ultimately arguing that transition medicine’s historical alliance with state powers works not to enable medical transition and transgender people more generally, but to manage them.