This historian saw the future of trans health care

The work of Gill-Petterson illustrated for Bransteter the narrowing effect that the identity policy-prime can have at a time when “we need solidarity through the difference,” he says. “Not only because my daily work is almost by definition of identity, but also because, as Jules’ work shows, the identity itself is something that we are often forced to model by ourselves from what the violent systems have left us.”

Over the years, the work of Gill-Petterson, who, in addition to both his books, also includes his editorial tasks a Trans studies quarterly and his duties of Cozio on Death panel Podcast: has shifted attention to the construction of trans stories that are found beyond the search for American medical institutions. His next book, Transgender liberalismPrombo from Harvard University Press, will further shift this focus, presenting a “history of class differences between trans people and the ways in which the state and, by extension, medical institutions have served not only to outline but to intensify these differences”, he says.

The project began as a FAI -DA -te transition story, medical or other, but reorieated during its research while realizing how divergent our subject’s stories are. “The transition practices of Trans Women and Trans Men are substantially completely separate up to the last 40 years,” says Gill-Petterson, adding that the latter group has historically experienced the upper mobility even without hormones, while the former group does not.

One of Transgender liberalismThe main arguments, he tells me, is that trans health care in the United States was formed to face a group of people specifically: poor trans women, who, although sometimes were the fixtures of some quers neighborhoods, had become largely locked up by the labor market since the mid -20th century, with their life and their criminal and ligament invitations.

“The entertainers, the prostitutes, the girls on the walk: they were culturally important but who lived in extreme poverty for the era, not experiencing the same increase in the income and wealth that others, in particular the white Americans, were experiencing after the Second World War”, says Gill-Petterson. “The gender clinic was created to rehabilitate them in a coercive way”, or at least some of them, “in the women who work and bring them back to the economy”.

This month, the The Supreme Court will be issued its sentence United States against SkmettiA case of reference that examines the constitutionality of the prohibition of the assistance Tennessee that affirms the genre for young trans. It is possible that the court affects it for reasons that is discriminatory on the basis of sex, thus giving the aclu the previous legal that must challenge Similar laws in more than 20 other statesOr at least the ability to return to the lower court that supported Tennessee’s ban in the first place.

These victories are improbable, however, given the conservative majority of the bench. As for what might appear the worst scenario, “the worst scenario would be that things remain the same”, as Branches told me A recent interview for Dazed. For trans children and their families who live in those states who have limited access to young people to life -saving health care, “the world has already finished”.

However, as Gill-Petterson assures himself, the simple existence of a law that guarantees people “the right to change sex”, as once the critic winner of the Pulitzer Prize Andrea Long Chu definedIn itself it does not allow a person to do it. Therefore, he says, fighting for transition freedom from a medical point of view requires a more complete strategy than focusing on a single court sentence. “It requires an approach of bread and butter”, one who gives priority to economic security and adequate resources for everyone, he says.

“One of the great discoveries that I took away from this search [for Transgender Liberalism] This is what the cost of the medical transition has risen to the stars since the 1960s “when” transsexual women had to face an average cost of $ 3,500 in total for psychiatric evaluation, accessory assistance and surgical interventions in a gender clinic “, which translates into about 35,000 dollars. Just over $ 200,000 by the end of Century, when it was adequate to inflation, which is” out of course. of people, “says Gill-Petterson, affirming the obvious.