This roundtable brings together scholars working at the intersection of trans studies, intersex studies, and the history of medicine. The roundtable argues that the history of medicine stands to benefit from a greater engagement with some of the central questions of trans and intersex studies, namely: the historical and social contingency of concepts like sex, gender, and identity; the role of medicine in coercive and carceral treatment of trans and intersex people; and the positioning of trans and intersex people as objects rather than subjects of medical, social, and cultural knowledges.
Critical trans and intersex studies has produced a long-standing body of scholarship reckoning with the nature and social consequences of medicalized concepts like sex, gender, and identity. How can engagement with critical trans and intersex studies enrich the understanding of these concepts held by both scholars and practitioners? What would it mean for both medical education and the history of medicine to center trans and intersex people as producers of knowledge on these categories, rather than objects of clinical investigation?
Trans and intersex people in the U.S. have been subject to remarkably high levels of psychiatric incarceration, forced surgical and medical interventions, and medically justified criminal detention. As such, trans and intersex studies has long engaged with medicine as a site of coercive and carceral power. The history of medicine, on the other hand, has been slower to turn to trans and intersex studies as a source of knowledge and scholarship on the coercive and carceral potential of medicine. What can medicine learn about itself by engaging more proactively with trans and intersex studies? What would it mean for medical education to include the history of medicine’s collaboration with carceral and state power to vis a vis trans and intersex people?
Chair email:
[email protected]Learning Outcomes- Develop an historically informed sensitivity to the diversity of patients (including appreciation of class, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, cultural, spiritual orientations)
- Recognize the dynamic interrelationship between medicine and society through history
- Develop the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of medicine
