Introduction

Summary

This book analyzes trans health in the UK through two key questions. Firstly, what barriers are there between trans people and the ability to access quality healthcare? Secondly, when they are able to at all, how do trans people overcome those barriers? I have found that there are significant and unique obstacles that delay or prevent trans people from accessing both transition and non- transition related healthcare. However, I have also found that in many cases trans people are able to overcome or at least push back against these barriers in creative and effective ways. Understanding these barriers suggests demedicalization as a solution, which brings up a central tension that will be addressed in this book, one between demedicalizing transness and ensuring continued access to medical technologies for trans people who require them. Additionally, I outline a trans methodology which has developed throughout the course of this research. Overall this work paints a picture of a healthcare system struggling to meet the needs of a population and illuminates what we can learn from that population's response to that struggle.

Disciplinary home

Throughout this book I draw inspiration and knowledge from multiple disciplines, but ultimately the best home for this work is trans studies. While fairly new, the field of trans studies has a growing body of work and is interdisciplinary and deeply socially engaged in nature. In ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies’, Susan Stryker describes the field thusly:

Most broadly conceived, the field of transgender is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender- role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood. (Stryker, 2006: 3)

This description not only fits this book but is a road map for the kind of questions I hope to continue to explore throughout my career.