November 12, 2021

9:00 am / 5:00 pm

Medicine and medical understandings have played prominent and problematic features in framing transgender historiography. Often, the critical role of trans people in shaping and contesting medical knowledge and practices has been overlooked. In this workshop, we propose to turn the question around and ask what transgender history says about the history of medicine. How can we use transgender history and trans medicine as a lens to analyze broader developments in medicine? What does trans medicine tell us about knowledge production, medical technologies, and clinical practices in modern medicine? This workshop seeks to illuminate the history of trans/medicine as a broad analytical field with a variety of actors (activists, patients, media, institutions, experts), technologies (paper, pamphlets, membership magazines, newspaper articles, diagnostic tools, hormones, scalpels), and practices (community meetings, parties, rallies, blood tests, clinical examinations, construction of nosologies). The workshop approaches history as a meaningful way of responding to pressing issues for trans people and trans medicine in the present.

Organizers: Ketil Slagstad, MD and Jacob Moses, PhD